LM: Well, I want to try to touch most of the highlights. The next year you did another fine film, THE GREEN PASTURES.
MOHR: That was an interesting film too. Again I had a director who had never made a film, Marc Connelly. Marc didn’t do the whole picture; he got about halfway through when they had to take him off and put somebody else on, although Marc produced it. Again, a hell of a fine person, but completely out of touch with motion picture technique—purely a stage director, and mainly a writer. Again we had to have tremendous sets that covered whole stages, and again I had a director who knows nothing about film. He left me alone insofar as photography was concerned, and I did a great deal of lining up of shots for him. But his method of working was, for example, we’d have four or five hundred Negroes on the set, and instead of keeping his mind on the principal action in the foreground and letting his assistants take care of the little black angels who were sitting on clouds at the far end of the stage, he’d run all the way back there and start telling them to sit a certain way, or do a certain thing—and for Christ’s sake, you’d never even see it. We got so far behind schedule due to this inattention to the proper things that they finally put Bill Keighley on to finish the picture. It’s nothing against Marc, but he just devoted himself to the unnecessary things that he let the major things get away from him. But it was a happy experience; I enjoyed working with these people.
LM: Let’s go on to DESTRY RIDES AGAIN.
MOHR: That was a happy picture; a lot of fun.
LM: How did you handle Marlene Dietrich, as far as lighting and glamour treatment were concerned?
MOHR: Well, I took a page out of Joe von Sternberg, out of the way he handled her. I have a lot of respect for Marlene, as a performer, as a professional, far and above that which I have for a great many people in this industry. She knew what was best for her, and she knew a little something from what Joe had taught her. He taught her a lot about where the key light should be in relation to her, and so on. That didn’t mean that she told me how to light the thing, but it meant that when I had a key light—well, George Marshall directed the picture, and George would rehearse a scene. I’d watch them rehearse, then I’d put in stand-ins to light them, and I’d get certain key lights here and there, always thinking of what light was good for Marlene. She’d watch while I was lighting the set, and then I’d go through with her, and say, “Now there it is up there for this position, Marlene, and there it is for that position . . .” She was just wonderful. I don’t think her performances suffered for it, because she did it instinctively. I didn’t use any great diffusion—it wasn’t that kind of a picture—as I would have with the other kind of things she was doing with Joe, SHANGHAI EXPRESS, and such. She looked more realistic—she was sharper, in DESTRY. I did use some diffusion, but the lighting was meticulous, and she worked right to the lighting. We did one thing on that picture that was very amusing. There were several scenes played in a small dressing room. I was lighting the set, and she was sitting there. There was a great rapport between us, and she started saying, “Don’t you think you ought to so-and-so and so-and-so?” I said, “Look, Marlene, if you want to light the set, you go ahead.” I took my blue glass off and handed it to her, and said, “You go right ahead.” In those days you could take a little more time. So I sat down, and she started trying to light lights, and she got so involved, she finally said, “For Christ’s sake, Hal, go and light the set.” So I cured her of that.
Mohr consults with a scrip girl while director William K. Howard gives instructions to Aline MacMahon for BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN (1939).
LM: Then you won your second Oscar at Universal for PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.
MOHR: That’s right. That was color again, three-strip; I had Duke Green working with me, the Technicolor man. He did almost everything I did out there; I always used a color man with me. Billy Skall worked with me on one thing I did out there, SCHEHERAZADE.
LM: What was his function?
MOHR: He’d watch and see if I was getting in trouble technically; he’d say, “Don’t you think we ought to have a little more light here?” He was kind of a follow-up man; he’d go in and measure the light to see if it was up to the Technicolor requirements. He was really very helpful.
LM: Did you prefer working in color or black and white?
MOHR: I had no special feelings, because eventually I had been working with the same color coordinator. I reached the point where I had enough self-assurance and control that I could light it the way I wanted to light it. And I lit for color exactly as I’d lit for black and white. I didn’t change the method at all. At first, I would throw more fill light in, but then I realized that that was all crap, that you just light the thing the way it looked best to the eye, and throw enough light on to get the exposure, and that was it.
LM: While you were at Universal, you worked on a number of B pictures; how did working on a programmer change your method of working, or preparation?
MOHR: Well, you didn’t have that much time with a B picture, and mostly the B pictures weren’t that artistic in their concept, so it was just good, straightforward photography. There was nothing special about the photography, nothing you could be creative about.
LM: What about working with Fritz Lang?
MOHR: I think Fritz is a hell of a good director. I did RANCHO NOTORIOUS with him. He was all right, but I don’t like people who abuse people; I guess that’s inherent with me, all my life. I’ve never abused anybody; I’m rough with people, a disciplinarian, but I don’t abuse them, use people as a patsy. Fritz was a lovable guy, a nice guy, and Dietrich adored him, but he had the faculty of riding the camera dolly. He had to watch through the finder; he’d hold the operator to one side while he’d be looking through. Hell, an operator has to have complete control of the camera while a scene is being shot. In rehearsal it’s all right, but when you’re shooting the scene, you have to leave that man alone. I can get behind the camera and see what the operator is doing, I can see if he’s getting the scene or not. But with a guy doing what Fritz did you can’t do the job. He got very abusive to some of my camera crew. So one day I finally had to have it out with him; it was a very unhappy occasion. But I finished the picture. Howard Welsch was the producer, and I wanted to get off the picture, I wanted to quit. Howard prevailed upon me to stay—and Lang wanted to fire me, he wanted me to get off the picture. So we never talked to each other for a long time, we just went ahead and did the work.
LM: Having gone through one flood experience you then did THE LAST VOYAGE, which was also quite spectacular.
MOHR: I wanted to do the picture; I had known Andy and Virginia Stone—they’re one of a kind. I’m very fond of Andy, and of Virginia. But Andy’s idea of making films is not my idea of making films. I had one experience with Andy; many many years ago I had done a short with him for Paramount. He had tried several times to get me to make pictures for him, and I’d always found a way not to do them, because I knew his reputation with other cameramen, the number of them he had fired, and that had quit. So when this thing came up, THE LAST VOYAGE, he asked me to come out and talk to him, and I did, and of course he was wooing me. I took a long time to make up my mind that I’d do the picture. And in the meantime people were telling me, “Hal, don’t do it; the first day you’ll either punch him in the nose, or walk off the set, or something. It’s going to be made in Japan, and that’s a hell of a place for that to happen. So just don’t start the picture.” They did this to me so long that I finally said, “Now wait a minute, I’ve worked with some directors I was warned against—Alan Crosland they told me the same thing about, that I’d never get along with him. With von Stroheim I got along beautifully up until a moment when a thing happened within a few seconds. I got along beautifully with Fritz until the last moment.” So I got along with directors that other cameramen didn’t get along with, and they were crazy about me, and I attribute it to the fact that I was doing my job, and I was doing a professional job. So I said, “I’m going to prove some
thing: I’m going to do this picture; I’ll do it, and I’ll finish it. I won’t quit; I don’t care what he does.” So I took the job, went to Japan, and he was everything that they said he was. But I had perfect control of him. Sometimes I would reach a pretty strenuous point, and Virginia would intercede, and it worked out. It was a tough picture to make; the most difficult picture I’ve ever made in my life, as far as physical hard work is concerned. And before the picture was finished, he wanted to sign a contract with me, make me a partner. I told him, one day on the boat, weeks before it was finished, “Andy, I love you, and I’ve proven now that you couldn’t beat me down. I’m making this picture, I’m going to finish this picture, but you sonofabitch, I wouldn’t work for you again if you had all the money in the world. I want to be good friends with you, but I’ll never work for you again.”
LM: When you finally sank the boat, there were no retakes, were there?
MOHR: No, no . . . and you know, the only shot we made that was not made on that boat was the final shot of them running up the deck with the boat going under the water; finally the boat goes under the water, they jump overboard, and the camera goes under the water with the boat. I think that’s one of the finest shots that’s ever been seen in motion pictures. We did that out here at the beach at Santa Monica—because obviously, you couldn’t have actors working on a sinking boat. But nobody ever knew it wasn’t made on the boat, it was that realistic. But what I wanted to do, if you recall that particular scene, as they dove off the boat, and the water finally overtook them, it also overtook the camera, and the camera submerged; then you saw them climbing into the lifeboat. What I wanted to do was, I wanted to make the camera go under water, as it did, have them disappear, take an air chamber and have this chamber give a terrific burst of air flying in front of the camera, have the camera tilt up and away from that, up to the surface of the water, and you’d see the silhouette of this lifeboat, and see these figures being pulled into the boat. It would have cost some money, and Andy was very bad with money, but what I wanted was in effect a continuous shot. I would have done it in three pieces. But it would have involved getting an underwater camera, and an underwater cameraman; it would have cost a few thousand dollars, and Andy wouldn’t go for it. But as it was, it was a hell of an effective shot. But a lousy picture.
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 16
