The Art of the Cinematographer

by Leonard Maltin

  LM: . . . a fine director . . .

  MILLER: Oh yeah, and a wonderful man. And from there, I went to Fox.

  LM: When you were at Fox, did you have a choice of what pictures you were to do?

  MILLER: Oh no.

  LM: Do you remember one called ME AND MY GAL?

  MILLER: Yeah, that was the first one I ever did, with Spencer Tracy.

  LM: There’s one shot—I wonder if you remember it—where some gangsters are trying to get into a bank from a room above, and they cut through the ceiling. When the piece of the ceiling is cut through, we see this from below, and when it falls onto the level below, the camera shakes.

  MILLER: I did that; I had the camera on a rubber-tire dolly, and just hit it. Now, this wasn’t original, because I had seen the earthquake picture over at the Chinese theater, and I saw what effect it gave. That’s what they did all through it; you’d hear the rumble first, everything would start to shimmy, and then it would hit. They rolled their dolly. I did it in THE RAINS CAME exactly as they did it in OLD SAN FRANCISCO, running the dolly against a bumper, and you’d get quite a shiver. All I did was go to Johnny Arnold, who was the head of the camera department, asked him how they did it, went back to the studio and did it.

  LM: There was one called THE MAN WHO DARED that was quite good.

  An actual enlargement of one of Miller’s light tests for BRIGHAM YOUNG. FRONTIERSMAN ( 1940), with Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell.

  MILLER: Oh, yes; you know that picture was made for pennies. Didn’t we have a tunnel in that, down in the mines? We made that for peanuts, a real quickie. I think we made it in sixteen days. Preston Foster had another picture to do, and they put this director. MacFadden. on it. He said to me, “Can we make a picture in sixteen days?” I said, “I don’t know if you can, but I can. But you’ll only get one crack at each scene, you know; you can’t fiddle around and make thirty takes.” He said, “I’m willing, my job hinges on this.” We started to shoot, and he’d look around, I’d say OK, and that was that. It was a pretty good picture.

  LM: Did you ever do trick work with minimal sets, to make them look like more than they really were?

  MILLER: We did an interior which was practically the interior of the Taj Mahal, and it was all cardboard cutouts. That was THE NAULAHKA, with Tony Moreno. I brought Billy Menzies—William Cameron Menzies—into the business on that picture. I met him in a restaurant I used to go to; he was going to art school half a day and working in an antique shop the other half a day.

  LM: How about HANDY ANDY?

  MILLER: That was Will Rogers—dear old Bill. A nice guy. I was with Will Rogers on a set the day he left to go to San Francisco; he’d just finished a picture called DOUBTING THOMAS, and the director I’d known very well, Dave Butler. I went over to see Butler, and Rogers had just finished. He said, “Well, I’m going to go up to meet Wiley, up in San Francisco. I don’t know whether I should go or not; I don’t like to fly around in a lot of snow.” He went anyway. You know, he lived out here, where the tourists go now, out in Santa Monica Canyon. About four o’clock he’d begin to sing “Santa Monica Canyon Is Calling Me,” and he’d get Butler’s goat. But we always finished a week ahead of schedule. He’d come to me and say, “Get the names of the crew.” I’d get the names of all the electricians, the grips, give them to him, and he’d give them all a check for a week’s salary, because we finished a week sooner. He thought he was doing them out of a week’s salary.

  Miller (left), assistants, and Walter Pidgeon prepare to shoot a scene for MAN HUNT (1941).

  LM: What was the first time you worked in color?

  MILLER: The first color I ever shot was in Technicolor. I shot the first piece of Technicolor with artificial light, in 1924, on a picture called CYTHEREA. I was working for Sam Goldwyn. He called me, and said, “A man came over from Technicolor, and he’d like to do an episode of the picture, and if I don’t like the color, I don’t have to buy any of it. If I like it, I can buy as many prints as I want. I figured if it’s worthwhile, maybe I’d buy prints for the big cities.” I said, “What have you got to lose?” He said, “Well, do you know anything about color?” I said, “No. Why don’t you send a guy over.” So a fellow showed up with the equipment, a fellow by the name of Ball; the camera was a Bell and Howell, but it pulled two frames. We had no light meters, so I started putting light in. He told me not to use all arcs, so I said OK. I made hand-tests in my little box, with ortho film, and it turned out so black, so overexposed. Finally the leading man Lew Stone called me over and said, “I can’t stand this, it’s getting too hot in here.” So I said to the fellow Ball, “We’re going to lose these actors.” He said, “Well, can you put a little more light under this couch.” It was right near the edge of the set, and I said, “I can do it, and I will, but it Usually isn’t very bright under a couch.” He said, “I have to go on the theory that where there’s no light, there’s no color.” So he wasn’t so dumb. We shot the thing, and Goldwyn bought for all the big cities this one sequence in color. They did a lot of that from then on.

  LM: Were you pleased with the results?

  MILLER: Yes, I was. It was as good as any color I’d ever seen; this did have a sharp image on both the magenta and the blue-green.

  LM: How did you adjust yourself to preparing for color, then?

  MILLER: Well, you’d do all right; you would jiggle your light bar up and down, until you got the flesh tones. When you got the flesh tone right, you let the rest go; if it turned out to be a bluish-looking horse, he had to be a bluish-looking horse. The flesh tone was the key.

  LM: How did working in that early color compare with doing a later film like THE BLUEBIRD?

  MILLER: I did that, and another one in color, THE LITTLE PRINCESS. I didn’t have much faith in exactly how this was going to work out. You see, to do a picture with a child like Shirley Temple—you know what a thousand-foot candle is? A thousand-foot candle, when you turn it on, jolts you right out of your seat. So Zanuck called me into the office and said, “We’d like to do a picture with Shirley in color. Is that possible?” I said, “In Technicolor, if you go by what the Technicolor people have you do, no, we can’t do it. Because you have to have one-thousand-foot candles.” He said, “What’s a one-thousand-foot candle?” I said, “I’ll set a one-thousand-foot candle up down on the stage, and if you drift through today, stop in, I’ll put it on, and I’ll have it marked where you can stand and look at it, and see how strong it is.” So I had an arc set up, and he came in, I set him on the spot, and said to the gaffer, “Hit it!” When he hit it, Jesus, Zanuck said, “Do actors work in front of lights like that?” I said, “They do. You must agree that a kid can’t stand that kind of light. However, if you want to do a picture in Technicolor, and you get permission from Dr. Kalmus that we don’t have any restrictions about how much we have to use, as long as we give him a negative that’s satisfactory for them to come up with color they’re satisfied with, we can do it.” So he called Kalmus, the head of Technicolor, and a fellow by the name of George Dye came over with a camera. I went down on the back lot with Shirley, her mother, and a makeup man, and I shot a long-shot of her standing in the middle of the street, walking over to go in the house—Jimmy Dunn comes over and talks to her, and she goes in the door. Now we copied the doorway, built it on a stage, and I used five- to six-hundred-foot candles, put the lights up high, so they were out of her vision, and filler down below, played with her, and made the shot. The thing went to Technicolor and came back; I spliced the two together. Zanuck looked at them and said, “I don’t see anything wrong with that—what’s supposed to be wrong with it?” I said, “I don’t see anything wrong with it either. I think it’s pretty good, under the circumstances. But the main thing is, we can make the picture, if Dr. Kalmus says that’s all right.” Kalmus looked at it, and we got the word that we could go ahead and shoot. And that’s the way I made both pictures with this child, with at least 400 to 450 foot less than the supposedly required amount.
If I’m a guy who works in charcoal and can work in pastel, and I’m going to do a portrait of you, if I take my canvas and charcoal and do a sketch, I’d have tones, shadows. Now supposing I did it with pastel crayons—I’d give you the same tones, wouldn’t I? There is no difference. The same thing in film. What makes it easy in color is if you put green against blue, you’ve got separation. In black and white, you have to create these separations with your lighting; that’s what separates the men from the boys. I did a picture, THE SONG OF BERNADETTE with Henry King, and Jennifer Jones sees the Lady in the film. I figured that this was one of those holy-holy pictures, we might as well ease into this thing; before she sees the Lady, try to suggest that there’s something different about this girl. I never said anything to King, but in her home, with her father and mother, and wherever she sits at the table, in back of her, there’s just a slight glow of light on the wall. Not obvious, not a spotlight. Wherever she stopped against the wall, nobody noticed it—it was that slight. We had some little friendly words; we shot three days, and King said to me, “Jesus, if I knew we were going to shoot this thing from the floor, I’d have brought my overalls.” So about three weeks went by, and the cutter came and said she had three reels made up. King said to me, “Do you want to see them?” I said, “Sure.” So we went into the projection room, just King and I, and the editor. We looked at it, and the lights went on, and the first thing he said was, “It looks kind of good, it looks beautiful.” I said, “Did you notice the shot from the floor?” He said, “My God, I didn’t notice it at all. But you know, there’s something happening in this picture. I noticed every place she stops, there’s a little glow of light behind her!” So then, after she saw the Lady, I really went overboard.

  Fritz Lang (extreme left) and Miller sit on the camera platform as it tracks along with Pidgeon’s pursuers in MAN HUNT.

  LM: You worked with a lot of directors. In some cases, did you find that you had more responsibility for getting the picture on film than in others?

  MILLER: Oh yeah, according to the director. I found out that the less the director would bother you, the more you could help him. This sounds funny, but a guy will come in today and say, “Put on a two-inch lens,” or “Put on a three-inch lens.” If I were to ask him, “Why do you want a three-inch lens instead of a 40mm?” I guarantee you he couldn’t tell me. I spent sixty years at this business, and I know how you use lenses. You don’t only have them so you can get close to somebody you can’t reach otherwise—you use them for different purposes. For instance, I made a picture, THE PURPLE HEART, and these fellows were shot down in Japan, six or seven of them, and tried in a Japanese court. In back of the three judges was the Japanese flag. I had it made loose, so I could raise it a little, lower it a little, or turn it a little. Because when I’d get one judge, I could balance him off with the composition of the red ball on the flag; if I had two judges and the ball came over his eye, I could always move it over a little and get composition. Now sometimes when I’d want to emphasize this thing, above the importance of the judge, I’d put on a long-focus lens, get back farther, and make the flag predominant. If I want to emphasize the judge, I’d get closer, use a wide-angle lens—I’d still have the flag, but it would be smaller in the background. And you’d use this with your actors—you make one more important than another by the focal length of the lens you use—there are all sorts of things you can use this for. True, there are places where you’re cramped against the wall, and the only reason you use a wide-angle lens is so you’ll get the set in without knocking the walls of the studio down. But when a director says, “Put on a four-inch lens,” if he could tell me why, I wouldn’t mind, because if he told me why, I might learn something—I’m always willing to learn. He could say, “I want it because I don’t want too much depth of focus; shoot it with a four-inch and try to cut the shutter, and leave the lens wide open—you’ll get less depth of focus.” Then the guy would be talking sense. Now I’d figure out, “Why did he want less depth of focus?” and nine times out of ten it’d come to me what he had in mind in his continuity, and I wouldn’t only give him what he wanted, I’d give it to him better. I’d exert every thought I could get in my little noggin to help him achieve this thing that he was after. But when they come and tell you to put on this or that—they usually do this when there’s a group of people around. Ford, I don’t think Jack Ford ever told me what lens to put on—he knew nothing, he never looked in the camera. He’d say, “What do you get?” I’d say, “From there over to the end.” And no marks on the floor for the actors—they might look down for their marks. This man directs less than any man in the business. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t direct—he doesn’t want any actor to give an imitation of him playing the part. He wants the actor to create the part—that’s why he hired him, because he saw him in this part. You’d sit at a big coffee table in the morning—everybody was there, whether you worked that day or not. You’d drink coffee until you couldn’t swig it down any more. If you had a part in the picture, he’d start telling you about some scenes in the picture, and suddenly a guy over there would realize that he was talking about the character he was p!aying—but he’d be talking to you. Now the actor would start using his imagination—I caught wise to this after a year or so—and you could see it, he wasn’t listening to the conversation any more, he’d be thinking. This was the way Ford got performances out of people. Some directors will tell you, “Now you pick up the cigarette lighter, and you look at the girl and say, ‘You know, I think!’—and then you light the cigarette—‘that you and I would make a good team.’ Then you close the cigarette lighter.” They’d tell them every move, until you might as well have a monkey in there, imitating what this guy is doing. How does he know that I would say, “You know I think—” and then light the lighter. I might not do that at all.

  LM: What directors used that method?

  MILLER: Many of them.

  LM: Lubitsch was well-known for acting out scenes for his cast.

  MILLER: Lubitsch’s pictures, if you look at them, you’ll see they are the most old-fashioned pictures in technique. He never advanced his technique. He still would cut, close-up here, cut, close-up for the laugh. He was a nice guy—I did two pictures which he produced; Preminger directed one, and Mankiewicz directed the other.