LM: Have you encountered directors who have ignored the visual aspect of the film entirely, leaving it all in your hands?
HALL: I would say that on WILD SEED, the way we worked on that was that Brian Hutton had some specific ideas about how he wanted certain things done, but basically he would rehearse the scene with his actors, block it out, then he’d come to me and say, “What do you think about how to shoot it?” and I would tell him, and he would agree with me, or if he didn’t agree with me, we’d talk it out, and come to an agreement. But because he had never directed before, and because he didn’t have a background in visuals, he left it basically up to me.
LM: That must give you great satisfaction.
HALL: No. If I’m going to be in charge of it, I want to be the director then. All or nothing at all. I don’t want somebody to say, “Here’s sixty pages of a chase, go out and set it up any way you want to; pretend you’re the producer and director, and I’ll abide with what you say,” and then when you come in, the actors have a different idea, but I can’t tell the actors what my idea was—all of a sudden you’re in the background, and your concept is down the drain. If I want to direct it, I want to direct it for real. Otherwise, I want to do what somebody else wants to do. And I can be good at what I do, and that gives me plenty of satisfaction.
LM: The next film I have credited for you is INCUBUS.
HALL: INCUBUS—ah, I love it. Shot in Esperanto, ten days’ shooting, great fun. Leslie Stevens is a madman, a lovable one, and has a compulsion about putting his wives in pictures. We went off and had a great ten days making INCUBUS. I don’t know what ever came of it, except I saw Francis Coppola recently in San Francisco and he said, “Hey, I saw a picture you did years ago called INCUBUS.” I said, “Oh, how’d you like it?” He said, “Well, I think they cut in a lot of new stuff—were there any nudes in it?” I said no. He said, “Well, it’s a nudie now.” I don’t think that Leslie had anything to do with that. His was a black magic film. I don’t know what the reason was for shooting it in Esperanto.
LM: That sort of limits its appeal.
HALL: It really does, because visually I’m proud of everything I did in it. We had not only camera trickery but every kind of skullduggery. We had people emerging from the ground, you know, the earth shaking and somebody coming up with horns, and in the background are mists swirling, and there’s a kind of gallowslike structure in the background, on which are standing three nuns in habits, and a giant bat with eighteen-foot wing span is folding and unfolding, flapping its wings in the background. If you don’t call that trickery, I don’t know. I don’t know what it means, but I loved it.
LM: On the subject of trickery, do you prefer doing things with your camera, or having them done by optical effects?
HALL: I don’t mind opticals, they’re all very necessary tools to use in telling the story. But how can I like that when I’m not doing it?
LM: So you would prefer to have the chance to do it yourself?
HALL: If it’s something that’s easier for me to do, or better; there are some things that are better for the optical printer to do, and I’m all for it.
LM: Next we come to MORITURI, or SABOTEUR: CODE NAME MORITURI . . . that went through several title changes.
HALL: Right . . . MORITURI is the title I remember. It was a good-bad film experience. They hired a director named Bernhard Wicki, who was a very talented man—he made a picture called THE BRIDGE, which I liked very very much. But he’s used to working under the influence of a small group of people, with an Arriflex camera; loop the stuff, shoot the sound later, you know, not worry about microphones and all that kind of thing. And he was suddenly thrown into the Hollywood system, with an actor who gave him a lot of heat, and a producer who gave him a lot of heat, and a production department that gave him a lot of heat. It was a mismatch. We had all sorts of problems. They were very unrealistic; going into it, the people wanted us to make a picture in sixty days that even the people who laid it out said would take ninety. Then they said, “Well, it can’t take ninety—do it in sixty.” So you go into it knowing that it’s not going to be done in sixty. Then problems arise, and all kinds of stuff. I enjoyed working with him very much, I admire him greatly. I loved working on a freighter, no sets or anything else like that.
LM: Do you like working exteriors? Some cinematographers have said they only like to work when they can control the situation.
HALL: I can control it outside, and inside. You’ve got all the control in the world in that lens. You can overexpose it, underexpose it, filter it, do anything you want.
LM: Next comes HARPER.
HALL: HARPER was my first color picture, and it was a can of corn. I did it just like black and white pictures, and it turned out terrific. I enjoyed working with Jack Smight, Paul Newman, and all the other people. Working with big studios you become sort of detached from everything except your own job. I remember one time, people looked at the schedule and saw what we were going to shoot, and the electrical department decided we would need forty electricians for the job. Right away, I know that forty electricians and eight generators is going to mean twenty miles of cable, and headaches galore. And I say, “How can we have this, we won’t be able to get anything done.” So I cut it down from forty to twenty, and we still didn’t get much done. But working in studios, the more people you have, the slower you go, the more cumbersome it becomes, the less fun it is. I like INCUBUS, where you’ve got two or three people, and you go out and shoot.
LM: Is there a danger on a picture with a long shooting schedule of becoming stagnant?
HALL: Not if it’s something you believe in. I never got tired of IN COLD BLOOD, or THE PROFESSIONALS. Pictures like HARPER are entertainments, and you don’t have the same involvement in them that you do in pictures that you feel are saying something, or trying to say something, while entertaining too.
LM: Have you experienced outside interference about how you should be photographing various pictures, from the studios themselves, for instance?
HALL: Yes, I’ve had a lot of harassment, because I probably don’t do it the way they like it. On WILLIE BOY, for instance, most recently, I was called into a projection room one day, and there were about eight or ten people in black suits sitting there, all with a dour look on their faces, and the lab man was there. I said, “What’s up?” They said, “There’s a shot here that they say won’t pick up on TV.” I said, “So what? I’m not shooting a thing for TV, I’m shooting a feature. I don’t give a shit about TV!” Well, they do, because they want to sell it to TV, and if there’s a shot that somebody thinks won’t register well on TV, they come and tell you, and try to make you feel bad, and probably would fire you if they could. But I just had nothing to do with them, I just turned around and walked out of the room.
LM: They could always keep protection takes and outtakes and use them later.
HALL: They don’t know anything! All they know is, they have a job, and unless they make a crisis and bring the importance of their job to the fore, their job is liable to be overlooked; people are liable to say, “What do we need him for?” and fire him. They have to justify themselves, and they justify themselves for really the stupidest reasons of all. This was a beautiful shot—and it will look great on TV. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever had was when Philip Scheuer, who used to review for L.A. Times, said about MORITURI, “I hope I never have to see this on TV, because it was so dark.” I hope he doesn’t have to see it on TV either, because I don’t want him to see it on TV—I want him to see it in a theater.
LM: You received your first Academy Award nomination for MORITURI, didn’t you?
HALL: The strangest thing that ever happened to me. It’s hard to believe that all of a sudden you can get nominated for something. Very strange. I didn’t belong to the ASC, or anything else at that time.
LM: Going on to THE PROFESSIONALS, one thing that stays in my mind is the very fine use of the wide screen, in a creative way, not just because
it was there.
HALL: I liked my work on THE PROFESSIONALS. I don’t any more, but I did then. I’ve since come to detest saturated colors, except for story-telling purposes.
LM: You had a lot of that in HARPER, in the kitchen scenes and others . . .
HALL: All very saturated stuff, and now I’ve done a complete flip-flop from that, so I don’t like my work on those pictures any more. But that’s just a matter of evolving into another area of creativity.
LM: You’ve worked in widescreen on virtually all of your films, right?
HALL: For the most part. DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE was not, that was 1.85.
LM: Do you have to reorient yourself to something like that?
HALL: No. It’s just a frame, just like paintings, in all different frames.
LM: When you’re shooting widescreen, there are so many problems in the way it will ultimately be projected, the fact that many theaters cut off part of the sides, and on TV they cut off even more . . .
HALL: I prefer to have them cut off the sides than to have them cut off the top and bottom. The problem with shooting in 1.85 is that many studios won’t let you hard-matte it, and the reason I recommend Panavision is that there’s no way to change it. The top and bottom are there. If you’re just one inch off, you see the frame-line, and the projectionist can do nothing but frame it exactly. True, he might not have a wide enough screen, and some of the picture might fall into black, but then that makes it better because it’s not quite so wide.
LM: What is hard-matteing?
HALL: The Academy aperture is 1 by 1.33 in proportion, and if they cut the top of the top and the bottom of the picture off slightly, you get the proportion 1 by 1.85, which gives you a wider screen. When CinemaScope came in, the people with regular lenses had no other way to do but narrow the top and the bottom. People do things to make money, not for any artistic reasons. I love Panavision’s equipment because it’s the best equipment in the business; the greatest lenses, the greatest cameras. They are a modern company, they keep on top of the business. They keep changing and improving their things.
LM: I was very surprised by your comments about Richard Brooks, because one doesn’t think of him being visually oriented; he’s a writer-director and that’s probably his most dominant image in most people’s minds.
HALL: Listen, he’s an original talent, like Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, and people like that. He’s a storyteller all the way. He can do any job, as I imagine most storytellers can. He knows photography as well as you do, maybe better; he’s a complete filmmaker. I don’t always agree with him, but I respect him greatly.
LM: On DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE the big news was the deglamorization of a star like Debbie Reynolds.
HALL: Of the pictures I’ve done, I like that least, primarily because I was scared when I was making it. I had been ill, and I was scared, afraid of dying. It’s hard to do good work when you’re scared. And I was breaking in a new operator, which is tough on a feature, because there are a lot of pressures. There are a lot of reasons that it was not a good experience. Debbie Reynolds always wanted to be glamorized; she always wanted me to put the key light over the camera; I didn’t want to put the key light there, because she was supposed to be a mother of a sixteen-year-old, and the producer and director were always telling me to make her look that way, and she wanted to look glamorous. She looks fourteen or fifteen herself anyway, she’s got one of those faces; I don’t try to make anybody ugly, I try to make them real. There was no reason why she should be ugly in the story, she could be attractive, as long as she looked more her age, and that’s what I tried to do. I paid probably less attention to lighting her than other cameramen had, and it bothered her.
Hall checks a light reading while director Richard Brooks (in light jacket), assistant cameraman Jordan Cronenwerth (with beard), Claudia Cardinale, and others wait on location for THE PROFESSIONALS in Nevada (1966).
LM: Are there actors who are particularly conscious of their lighting and photography?
HALL : Yes.
LM: Do you find that good or bad?
HALL: I find that bad for them. How can you act and think about the key light at the same time? One day Debbie had the producer show me a picture, and I didn’t know what it was all about until we were a third of the way through it. I said, “What the hell am I looking at this for?” He said, “Well, Debbie wanted you to see it.” I said, “What for? Why don’t you get Harry Stradling to photograph this picture? I can’t do what Harry Stradling does. It’s wonderful, I love what he does, but I can’t do it. I’m Conrad Hall and I do it the way Conrad Hall does it. And if she wants to look the way she did in that picture, she ought to get Harry Stradling.” And I walked out.
LM: Then it was a decided step up for you to do COOL HAND LUKE.
HALL : Yes. I went in to talk to Gordon Carroll and Stu Rosenberg about it, and Gordon said, “I think we have the possibility of something good here.” I read it, and I liked it, and we did it. And Richard Schickel said I made it look too good—I probably did. I wish we’d been able to shoot it in black and white. I hadn’t seen I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG, but I saw it about six months ago—Jesus Christ, what a film ! It’s ten times better than COOL HAND LUKE, and it’s so right in black and white—you know what I mean. Really terrific. I didn’t realize how much we had stolen from that picture.
LM: Then you feel that certain subjects lend themselves to black and white.
HALL: I do, yes. Absolutely. I think you work with all the tools you have at your hand to tell the story as well as you think you can, and I think black and white is a tool. It’s changing, everything’s changing; black and white was one thing at one time, now it’s another thing. Now it can mean other things to you artistically. It can mean somebody saying, “This is old-fashioned” subconsciously. If you’re doing a period piece that might be a good subconscious thing to achieve. I don’t think anybody’s going to say—if you pull them into the story—“Aw, this is black and white” and walk out.
LM: It seems sometimes that certain color pictures are so desaturated as to be almost black and white.
HALL : Yeah.
LM: I didn’t get that feeling in COOL HAND LUKE.
HALL: No, I hadn’t gotten into that yet. What I usually do is make tests for my next picture, or tests about anything, on the picture I’m on, on the slates. The slates are mine, I can do anything I want to with them. It’s before the scene begins, and I can overexpose it, underexpose it, throw filters on it, throw filters off it, and I can see what happens in the projection room. It doesn’t cost anybody any money, and I’ve learned a lot, on ten or fifteen feet of film, while you get up to speed.
LM: You’ve worked with several directors who are just starting out; does that kind of relationship encourage you?
HALL: I like working with new directors, because they involve you more. They’re running scared a little bit, and they involve you more creatively.
LM: Do you find them to be more daring in what they do?
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 24
