Art Film Talk: A critique of globalization

In Episode 17 of Art Film Talk I talk with David Redmon & Ashley Sabin, the filmmakers behind the documentary film Mardi Gras: Made in China. The film presents a fascinating critique of globalization.

Art Film Talk: Steve Garfield, Video Blogging

In Episode 16 of Art Film Talk I talk with Steve Garfield about video blogging. It was pure serendipity, I was driving to MIT to record an interview with Henry Jenkins, Steve called, and we ended up having lunch at the Stata Center, recording an interview, and then videotaped two promos for Podcamp Boston, one of which might appear on Rocketboom next week and the other is on Steve’s video blog. That was a fun afternoon.

Notes on the Interview

Some documentary filmmakers do interviews while others perfer to observe people and eschew the interview (in the traditions of direct cinema and cinema verite) while other filmmakers prefer informal interviews (very often used in personal documentaries); this is a matter of style that is up to each filmmaker. There is no right or wrong here, good or bad, simply different schools of thought. I like to mix things up, and choose the approach that seems to make the most sense for the subject at hand. In documentary, most decisions start with the topic and subjects, always tempered by matters of personal style and budget. I’ve collected many tips and rules of thumb over the years, here’s my collection. I never apply them all at once, rules were meant to be broken, or at least applied selectively.

Interviewing Tips and Rules of Thumb

Preparation is key. Some knowledge of the subject is important. Be familiar with your subjects background and their work and whatever is relevant for your specific film.

Pre-interview on the phone to determine if this person is right for your film. Sometimes spontaneity is more important and you will not pre-interview. Make this decision on a case by case basis, or depending on the specific topic of your film and the nature of the interviews.

Rehearse your questions out loud to make sure there is no room for misunderstanding.

Don’t forget to get the personal release form signed and make sure you have name, address, phone, email, etc. in order to be able to contact them and stay in touch. Do this before the interview starts, no release, no interview. You need to have the rights to everything that ends up in your film, otherwise, you may run into trouble later. It’s simpler and easier to ask for a release to be signed than to track them down what could be years later.

Consider putting people together to talk, sometimes couples or groups give you more; sometimes disagreements yield good.

Keep your list of questions in a notebook.

Primarily good interviewing is about observation, empathy, and preparation (knowing as much as you can about the subject to start with)

Design questions carefully give the specific issues you want to discuss. Research and Preparation is key.

Decide what setting is best for your interviewee, their home, office, in the park, in their studio?

Explain clearly to your interviewee why you are shooting them.

Depending on your stylistic choices, instruct interviewees to include questions in their response, speaking in full sentences, this will make things much easier to edit. You may have to coach your subject on this, and approach it that way, rather than telling them they are doing something wrong, explain how it makes the editing easier.

Be natural in your interviewing, this comes from practice and genuine empathy for your subject.

Depending on your stylistic choices, if you are going to redirect or interrupt interviewees let them know this in advance, make it conversational, organic.

Listen actively and carefully to make sure answers can stand alone. This gets easier the more you interview.

Listen not only for what you want, but what the interviewee is really saying, don’t rush to the next question, if you don’t have something complete or coherent, ask the question again, or take another angle on the same question. It has been my experience than very often the second time around the answers are more coherent. This, of course, depends on the nature of the interview.

Avoid vague and general questions. Ask for details, specifics, examples: this makes the interview more interesting.

Ask interviewee not to look at the camera unless you are doing first-person address (see section below on the Interrotron).

Showing people in their own environment is often my preference, some people are better when they are walking around their own space and talking to you, the walking and talking interview can be very effective, especially with artists and craftspeople who work with things.

Don’t forget to cover the environmental context, this B-Roll can be very important.

Start with factual questions and keep the more intimate or emotional information for later when the subject is more comfortable with you and relaxed and with the situation.

Try to cover each issue in more than one way to give you the ability to cut in and out of the interview in order to tighten the material.

To get into a delicate area, you can use the devil’s advocate approach, for example, saying “some people would say there’s nothing special about personal documentary” and let the interviewee respond…

Another way to get into a sensitive topic is to start with a general question and then ask for specific examples.

Practice active listening: Getting deeper: try gentle “And…” and “Yes, go on…” and even silence. Don’t be afraid of silence, sometimes it’s the best way to get more from the interviewee. Sometimes if you allow some moments of silence after an interviewee has finished adding a question, look at them, approve with your gestures, but be quiet for a moment, they might be thinking and go into something else. And if they don’t, your sound editor will appreciate having little pieces of “room tone” that match closely what was said (ambient noise often changes over time, so recording room tone an hour later yields a very different sound).

As the interview has wound down and you feel you’ve gotten all that you need, I suggest you ask: “is there any question I should have asked that I’ve not asked today?” Sometimes people will go on a whole other tangent that relates to something important to them, and sometimes this is great footage, often people have nothing to add. But just in case your subject has been wanting to say something, give them the chance, it may turn out to be what you needed for the interview.

Always acknowledge what was successful about the exchange at the end of the interview.

Be very positive and thankful, yet don’t lead your subject to believe they are going to be in the film, if they ask, explain to them that the interview was successful, but it’s eventually up to the editor what ends up in the final film, but express you’re happy with what you’ve got. Basic respect is key in managing these relationships and situations.

First or Third Person Interviews?

The subjects gaze vector (where they are looking) depends on Placement of Camera, Intervieweee and, Interviewer. Determine the audience relationship with the interviewee and choose on-axis or off-axis interviews as appropriate, a.k.a. third-person and first-person address. Third Person Address: Interviewer off camera slightly to the left or right, or under the camera lens, interviewee is talking to an off-screen presence. First Person Address: Interviewer right in the camera lens (see Interrotron below), interviewee is talking right to the audience

Movies like The Fog of War (2003) and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) feature interviews with a very unique quality in which the interviewee is looking straight into the camera, with facial reactions that are the result of very intimate communication with the interviewer. This is accomplished through the use of a device Errol Morris calls the “Interrotron.”

The Interrotron is basically a teleprompter, but instead of projecting text in front of the camera lens for the subject to read, it projects the face of the interviewer in the camera lens. This way the interviewer and interviewee can make direct eye contact with each other and the interviewee is reacting directly to the interviewer’s facial gestures. This results in interviews with a piercing sense of intimacy, as if the interviewee was talking not just into the camera lens, but directly to us, the viewers of the film. This is often called first-person address interviews, and with the Interrotron first-person interviews achieve their most intimate and direct expression.

I have used this approach for customer testimonial interviews with two cameras capturing the close-up and medium shots simultaneously. The customers speak directly to the viewer rather than an unseen third person as is typically done in most documentaries, industrials, and broadcast news magazines. This works for some films, yet there is a reason most films don’t use it, it’s the cinematic grammar of salespeople and hucksters, however, in the right context, it can be engaging and intimate, giving the audience the experience of people talking to them, rather than to an off screen presence.

Formal or Informal Interviews?

There are many different styles of interview, when it comes to formal interviews, lighting, the setting, and composition are important. I’m reminded of the following quotes:

“The image is the basis of the visual language of motion pictures … the camera can actively comment upon or interpret what it observes, making each frame a picture worth the proverbial thousand words … the camera is to the filmmaker what brushes and oils are to the painter” – Saul J. Turell and Jeff Lieberman (from notes for the series “The Art of Film”)

“…good close-ups radiate a tender human attitude in the contemplation of hidden things, a delicate solicitude, a gentle bending over the intimacies of life-in-the-miniature, a warm sensibility. Good close-ups are lyrical; it is the heart, not the eye, that has perceived them.”— Béla Balázs in Theory of the Film

“Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.” — Diane Ackerman in The Natural History of the Senses

Which I include here because they explain better than I could why I try to carefully light, compose, and design the setting for formal interviews, when I do formal interviews (they are not always the right way to go.

Parting Words

A good filmmaker is a lifelong student, it’s a journey that never ends. Take advice, listen to criticism, it’s the path to learning, and always teach something to others as well, you learn best what you have to teach the most.

These notes were originally compiled in June of 2004, revised and posted January 23, 2006.

A conversation with David Leitner about “The Technical Writer”

Article Reprint

Originally published as “This Ain’t no DV, This Ain’t no HD, This Ain’t no Fooling Around: A conversation with David Leitner about ‘The Technical Writer’” in the The New York Independent Film Monitor, Volume 8, No. 4 (January 2003).

The Technical Writer, directed by Scott Saunders, tells the story of an agoraphobic technical writer who lives in a basement apartment in New York City. The film strikes a balance between noteworthy technical achievement (shot and posted in Sony’s IMX MPEG-2 Digital Format) and compelling visual aesthetics. I recently had a conversation with David Leitner, who played a unique triple role as Cinematographer, Producer, and Technologist.

Tamés: The Technical Writer straddles a painterly quality and a documentary quality. On the surface there’s a lot of existing-light cinematography, but there’s clearly more to it.

Leitner: I’m using tiny amounts of light, but if you really look at what is going on, the colors are artificial. In my mind I was going after a Lucian Freud look, with fallow, morbid colors. Lucian Freud is a British painter and a grandson of Sigmund Freud. His paintings are often large nudes or portraits, and the color tones in the skin are morbid, greens and greys and flat sienna colors. The work has a sense of morbid human flesh and a lot of it.

Tamés: How does this fit with the film?

Leitner: The technical writer in the film is a man who lives in a basement Manhattan apartment and he’s agoraphobic. He has a fallow, drained complexion, and I wanted to convey that aspect of him. He spends most of his time in front of a computer screen. I wanted that computer screen to be the key light in many cases. That you could say is naturalism. For instance, if the camera was pointed at the face, you did not see what was on the screen. We would display color fields [on the LCD computer monitor] to give you the impression he was looking at different web sites going from a blue to a red, and then a second later to a green, but it does not feel unreal, it does not feel non-naturalistic. It may be a little over-the-top, and this is a tension I like to play with a lot.

Tamés: Yes, the lighting is natural and yet it’s not.

Leitner: In some of our scenes, if you walked onto the set you would be looking for the light switch, but they were lit already. If you look at a lot of the lighting I do it looks natural, but if you look a little closer, I’m fooling around with things. And I can’t explain it. I just know when I do it and if I like it. If you look carefully at the film there are a lot of unmotivated primary color light sources, but what are we talking about here is using tiny lights. My biggest colored light was a 30 Watt mushroom bulb, they are so tiny you don’t realize they are in the scene but I often place my light sources in the scene.

Tamés: Your work as a cinematographer on this and other films reminds me of Nestor Almendros. I remember reading a story he wrote in A Man with a Camera about shooting Days of Heaven in which the gaffer would set up the large carbon arcs lights every day and Nestor would ask him to turn them off. Almendros shot some comparisons with and without the arcs in order to show his gaffer the difference, however, the gaffer never came to the screenings of the dailies.

Leitner: He came from a documentary tradition. He was a maverick, as well, and that we share in common. If you can shoot at light levels that are comfortable and normal, in other words, not artificially boosted, do you shoot in a stylized way [pick and choose from the past] or do you shoot in a naturalistic direction as many people with a documentary background would be inclined to do?

Tamés: There seem to be more and more films being shot this way, and I don’t think it’s just about budgets.

Leitner: This is actually a bit of a revolution in cinematography. If you look at still photography, particularly the great documentary photographers, they used no lighting at all. So why in that very related field use of natural light is celebrated in terms of results but not in our field? It’s because we have been using these mechanical devices that required a great deal of additional lighting. Light levels had to be higher in terms of luminance to create a useful exposure. Today we have reached a point where technically the huge amounts of artificial light are no longer necessary.

Tamés: What inspired the time-lapse photography in the film?

Leitner: Back in ‘76 I attended a Warner Brothers summer student workshop and we shot in New York. We got on the Circle Line with some Super-8 sound cameras from Boston and we went around Manhattan… so in these movies you’re flying around Manhattan and the bridges are wizzing over your head, I’ve never forgotten that experience. In a personal way, shooting the time-lapse in The Technical Writer was my homage to that.

Filmmakers doing time-lapse in the past had to take the film to the lab and wait to find out if the exposure was right, if there was a hair in the gate, etc. The MSW-900P has an optional picture cache board that makes it the first true time-lapse video camera. What I can do with the 900P camera is phenomenal: I can shoot for five minutes and see my results a minute later, squeezed to 10 seconds. It gives me ideas, the ability to adjust things which allows me to evolve all sorts of techniques, some of which are in the film.

Tamés: You’ve been talking about advantages in production, but what does this new IMX digital 1/2″ tape format [MPEG-2, 50Mbps, 4:2:2, I-frame, 3:3:1 nearly-lossless compression], with double the bit rate and color resolution of miniDV look like when you screen it?

Leitner: I have to tell you the MPEG looks terrific. We were able to do screenings on a large plasma display with playback from a PAL miniDV player and this retains the clarity of digital reproduction.

Tamés: So, with all these tools it’s easier than ever to make a film that rivals bigger budget productions shot on film?

Leitner: It’s quite the opposite, it’s more complex today that it has ever been. I look back with nostalgia to the days when you just had to hold up a light meter and read a single reading to get a light level. You were not thinking about color space issues, detail circuitry… Back then the cinematographer was the only person who knew what the image was going to look like. They were magicians and as such they knew something that no one else knew, and there was a lot of mystique attached to that person.

Tamés: So, how has the cinematographer’s role changed?

Leitner: Today you are working with large monitors, usually high def monitors. Everybody looks at it, hair looks at it, make-up looks at it, gaffers look at it, the director looks at it. If it works well, then it creates a kind of true communal creative activity. My gaffer, Sam Wells (an experimental filmmaker) came up with a good metaphor: it’s very much like mural painting where someone draws the original cartoon and then all kinds of painters fill in the colors at once.

Tamés: Does this make for a better mural?

Leitner: When it does not work, you have all kinds of people that are looking at the monitor thinking they can do it better. What it has done has fundamentally altered the dynamic of the film set. When only the cinematographer knew what the image was going to look like, there was a whole lot of fear and uncertainty on the film set. For instance, to be a first assistant cameraperson you were pulling focus all of the time but you did not know till the dailies were printed how much of it you had ruined. Many camera assistants have become alcoholics and there is a reason for that.
Today, when you are working with these large displays on the set you can see instantly and it lowers the fear and anxiety quotient and sets are a lot calmer. Now again, some people will think this is great and some people will think it’s terrible for the art, but what is undeniable is the change that is taking place.

And it has another profound implication, people, are basing lighting decisions and cinematography decisions on what they are seeing on these monitors. Now if you accept the fact that no two monitors are exactly alike in terms of the way they are set up, their display is rarely a fixed thing. And the monitor is sitting in different lighting conditions, outside, indoors. The monitor and the color saturation look completely different in different ambient light conditions.

Tamés: Given that you can’t expect to make serious lighting decisions with a monitor this sounds like a problem.

Leitner: Lighting decisions are being made based on this, and you can say they should not be, you can say this till you are blue in the face, but people are going to do what people are going to do. As this practice becomes common that is what the filmmakers expect to see on the big screen, whether it’s film projection or video projection. On the other hand, no two images will ever, and can never, match, and yet, that is what some filmmakers expect.

Tamés: You shot almost all of the film with the new Zeiss DigiPrimes. Why did you choose to work with these lenses?

Leitner: For a number of reasons, first, I needed the apertures that only primes can deliver, second, prime lenses not only provide clearer images, they are considerably smaller. The director had done a previous film with a Betacam but his orientation was miniDV. In fact, he originally intended to shoot The Technical Writer in miniDV, so he wanted a very lightweight camera. As it turned out, the IMX camcorder (before you add camera and lenses) weighs in about 8 pounds, it’s reasonably light.

Tamés:So much of the film was hand-held?

Leitner: Yes, I would not have done that with a giant lens. I shot some of the pick-up shots with the Fujinon 6-30mm, that lens was way bigger than the camera! I wanted to keep the camera profile small. I used clip-on matte boxes, sometimes I just ripped the matte box off. I had this smallish camera, I got the best possible image quality, under the lowest lighting conditions, which meant I reproduced images full of subtlety.

Tamés: Could you have shot the film any other way?

Leitner: No. I took the technology I had assembled [Sony’s MSW-900P MPEG IMX camcorder, Zeiss’ DigiPrimes, DuArt’s ArriLaser Film Recorder, etc.]. No one had ever put these lenses on this camera, no one had used this camera to shoot a feature. I put them together with the expressed purpose of shooting in this style and getting this result. I knew what was possible, and it all panned out.