THE DIRECTOR-CAMERAPERSON RELATIONSHIP

The relationship between the cameraperson and the director is

probably the most crucial working relationship of the whole film. If
the camera- person fails to capture the material in the way the director
wants, the very basis of the film is flawed.
As mentioned earlier, the first task is to find the right person for the
particular job. Once you have found that person, you must get him or
her to understand and translate your vision to film as accurately as
possible. Of course, there’s more to it than that. You hope that the
cameraperson will take your vision, add his or her own creative skills
and imagination to the dream, and make something superb that
neither of you could have done singly.
Visions are abstract; scripts are concrete. Therefore, the first thing
to do is give the cameraperson the script or the proposal to read and
digest. The next thing is to discuss what you hope to do with the film.
The script will offer a partial explanation that will be amplified by
your discussion. This is also a time to discuss style, objectives, and
difficulties and to answer questions.
Some questions will relate to your filmic ideas, and others will be
practical ones about equipment, time for shooting, crew, and lighting.
You must gradually build a relationship of openness and trust, a
relation- ship in which each person values and respects the other’s
creativity and judgment. And this relationship and trust had better be
there because half the time you will be entirely in the hands of the
cameraperson, who will be working without your control.
Generally, I like to work with a familiar team and with a
cameraper- son who has been on location with me before. When I am
going to work with a new person, I like to do three things: I want to
see examples of previous work, I want to meet over a drink and get a
sense of the person behind the work, and I want to talk to people who
have worked with him or her in the past.
Most camerapeople will bring you a demonstration reel if you ask
for it, but it has to be viewed warily. The demo contains his or her best
work, the best extracts, which may not be typical. That’s why you
should check with a few people who have worked with the applicant to
see what he or she is really like. The personal meeting is necessary
because you need to get a sense of personality and temperament.
No matter how good the technique, if the person is dour and morose
or lacking a sense of humor, he or she will find no place on my crew.
Equally important, you need to assess whether the cameraperson is
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to direction. Some are all sweetness in the beginning but then refuse
to take directions on location. They become prima donnas, demand-
ing the sole right to select what is being shot and how it is being shot.
Usually you can sense this attitude in the first meeting or through your
background check. When I face an attitude like that, I just get rid of
the cameraperson.
But this does raise another point: who selects the shots? You both
do, with the director retaining the final judgment. If I am working with
an unfamiliar cameraperson, I will, at least in the beginning, select
most of the shots and also check the shots through the viewfinder. If I
am work- ing with an old friend whose judgment I trust and who
knows my style, I will let him or her choose the shots, and I merely
check the viewfinder when the framing is crucial.
Let the cameraperson know clearly what you want from the scene
and what specific shots are vital to you. For shooting a horse-riding
scene, I might say, “I want some wide shots of the woman riding
against the trees, some close-ups—real close—of her coming toward
us, and some cutaways of the spectators. You can also give me close-
ups of the horse’s hooves by themselves and a few shots of the other
riders waiting their turns.” If I know the cameraperson well, I might
leave it at that, but if he or she is unfamiliar to me, I will probably set
up a few shots to demon- strate the kind of framing I want. I will also
be very precise on crucial shots—for example, specifying that in the
close-ups I want the subject’s head to fill the frame.
Usually I leave a good deal open to the cameraperson’s judgment
after telling him or her what I am looking for in a scene. Most
camerapeople are creative artists in their own right, with years of
experience and a su- perb visual sense. Most probable, they neither
need nor want a director breathing down their necks the whole time. I
also like them to know that I am open to any suggestion of how to
improve the scene.
Keep one thing in mind: however much you trust the cameraperson,
the responsibility is yours. You must be aware the whole time of what
he or she is doing, and you must not hesitate to ask that the shot be
done over again if you think it has not been done as you want it.
From time to time, problems arise even with the best of
camerapeople, and you have to be prepared to argue the problems
through. In some cases the cameraperson gets overwhelmed with the
beauty of a particular shot and fails to see that the shot doesn’t convey
what you are looking for or that the shot has nothing to do with the
film at all. I was doing a film on architecture and wanted to shoot the
fancy new wing of a cer- tain museum. My cameraperson came up
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shots I have ever seen. The museum was framed through branches,
with beautiful patterns of sky above. The only problem was that you
couldn’t see the building for the branches. This being so, there was no
point in turning on the camera.
Not only do you have to guard against shooting beauty for the sake
of beauty but you also sometimes have to remind the cameraperson
that, unlike stills, the shot doesn’t stand by itself. It has to be edited
into a sequence, and if it doesn’t contribute to the sequence, it’s
useless.
Occasionally, the battle becomes one of art versus practicality.
Most camerapeople will try their utmost to give you memorable and
artistic shots, but if they take too long, the shot may not be worth the
effort. As a director you know that, but trying to convince the
cameraperson to relinquish the shot is something else. Why bother to
argue? Because time is money, and the effort spent on one shot
reduces the time you can spend on another.
A few years ago I was directing an industrial documentary for
which I needed a six-second shot of someone working with a laser. In
this case, my cameraperson decided to go to town on the sequence. He
set up inkies (very small lights), soft lights, and reflectors, generally
having a ball. But all this took an hour and a half, and when I told him
it wasn’t worth it for a six-second shot, we almost came to blows.
My argument with him was this. We had a great deal to do in very
little time, and the laser shot was not terribly important to me. Given
the circumstances, I didn’t want to waste an hour and a half on an
artistic six- second shot. I preferred a shot that could be executed in
fifteen minutes. He knew rationally that I was right, but his sense of
artistry was terribly offended, and he wouldn’t talk to me all the next
day.
Another problem concerns fatigue. Even under the best of
conditions, shooting can be a tremendous strain. Very often, a lot of
physical activ- ity is called for, as well as high concentration.
Ultimately, this affects the cameraperson’s performance, the energy
dissipates, and the shots lose any flair or distinction. Focus and
exposure will be all right, but the ultimate result will be very flat. This
situation usually occurs on the fifth or sixth day of a continuous shoot,
and you can often predict that it’s coming. When it happens, the best
thing is just to pack up for the day and get a good rest.
Most of the remarks up to now relate to the way the director and the
cameraperson handle the controlled sequence, but many documenta-
ries involve shooting developing news, action, or intimate sequences.
In many of these cases, the cameraperson has to act alone, so where
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does the director fit in?

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 As director, the main thing you have to do, as I’ve stressed before,
is indicate in advance how you want a scene shot and where the
emphasis should be. The more the cameraperson knows what you
want from a scene, what the point is, and where the emotional center
is, the easier it is to shoot it.
An interesting example of the director and cameraperson
relationship is seen in A Married Couple. In 1969 Richard Leiterman
shot A Married Couple for Canadian director Allan King. This was
an intimate fam- ily portrait shot verité style over the course of a few
months. King was rarely present at the shooting but analyzed the
rushes every few days with Leiterman so that the latter knew fairly
precisely what King wanted. In cases like this, the director’s job is to
get the fullest preliminary information possible, think it through,
and pass on directions to the cameraperson. Occasionally, the
director is present during the filming but is wary of disturbing the
cameraperson. Here it helps to work out a few directional signs, such
as a light tap on the shoulder for zoom in, two taps for a zoom out. If I
want the cameraperson to pay attention to a particular shot or to some
evolving action, I wait until the current shot
is finished and then whisper directions in his or her ear.
The guiding rule for working on uncontrolled sequences is to assess
as fast as you can the essence of the scene, let your cameraperson
know that, and make sure you get it. At the same time, keep in mind
that you will have to edit the scene, so be certain that you have enough
shots to enable you to do so.

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12. Directing The Interview

We use interviews at two stages of the film: during basic research and
during the filming itself. The problems arising during research have
been dealt with earlier. This chapter deals with preparing and
conducting the documentary interview.

BEFORE THE SHOOTING STARTS

At some point, you will have lined up a list of potential interviewees
for the film. It probably doesn’t include everybody you want, but it is
the best you can come up with given the circumstances. Once you
have decided whom you want to interview, and they have agreed to
appear, it’s vital that someone meet with the interviewees and go over
the nature of the interview and the way the filming will be conducted.
And the right person to do all this is usually the director and not an
assistant.
There are a number of objectives to this meeting. The most obvious is
to get to know the interviewees better and to explain, without all the
pressures of the camera, what you want from the interview. It’s also a
time to let the interviewees get to know you and to put to you any
questions about the film or the interview. In short, it’s a time to build
confidence between the two of you. What is important at this stage is
that you establish a few ground rules.
These rules may cover anything from the way you want the
interviewee to dress to questions that are off-limits. Such rules are
generally minor, but occasionally they can be very important. For
example, the interviewee may want a list of questions in advance and
may agree to answer only those questions. Is this a limitation you are
willing to accept? Again, the interviewee may demand to see the
interview at the editing stage or may want to have the right of
censorship afterward. You may or may not agree to all this. If any of
these things are likely, it is much better to discuss them before you
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 come to the filming than at the filming itself.
This pre-interview “getting to know you” does not have to be terribly
formal. Obviously, half the time it will be conducted at home or in the
office, but I have also gone fishing with the interviewee while
discussing the filming, and in another case I discussed matters while
helping strip an engine. The time taken in the pre-interview session
can also vary. It can be half an hour over a business cocktail, or it
might be a matter of days. There are no rules. The object is to know
the interviewee well enough to get him or her to relax with you and
trust you so that you can get the maximum out of the meeting on film.
The most important thing in interviewing is to know what your ob-
jectives are and what you want to get out of the film session. You may
want some very specific answers to very specific questions. Again,
your main aim may be just to get a general feeling of the person, his or
her attitudes, mind-set, likes, dislikes, prejudices, and so on. You may
want someone to talk generally about a mood or a situation. You may
want interviewees to detail their childhood, their divorce, the
importance of their research, or their reasons for committing a murder.
The main thing is that your questions must have focus and direc-
tion. This means that you must do your homework. Normally, this will
have been done in the research or the pre-interview meeting. But if
your filming is actually the first meeting, then make sure you know as
much about the interviewees as possible. Know who the people are;
where they come from; their likes, dislikes, political attitudes, and
biases. Obvi- ously, this is the ideal. Many of the documentary
interviews you do will be spontaneous, with no time for preparation—
in which case you just plunge in. When possible, though, your
questions should be thought out in advance. The interview itself may
lead in all sorts of directions and open up interesting new paths of
inquiry. That’s fine, but make sure you have the main lines of your
questioning preplanned.
Paul Gallagher, the supervising producer of Behind the Music,
MTV’s popular documentary series on VH1, has an interesting way of
handling interviews. The one-hour, episodic series profiles various
rock bands as they make their way up into stardom. This journey is
bumpy and often includes tragedy. The production time is usually over
a two-week period. Gallagher developed a technique of interviewing
and recording the main subject twice. The first time would be on the
first or second day of shoot- ing. Since the interviewee didn’t know
Paul well at that point, the answers to the questions are guarded. On
the last day of shooting, Paul would interview the person a second
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time. By this time the subject knew and trusted Paul and the crew. The
answers to some of the same questions had more depth and honesty. It
is during these second interviews that the emotional side of the story
emerges.

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