Picture Perfect: A conversation with cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt

Trevor Hogg chats with Academy Award nominated cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt about being a teenage photojournalist, working with director Mike Nichols, the Oscars and the current state of filmmaking...


My sister is a painter and architect, my father was a doctor but he always wanted to be a musician, and my mother was interested in painting. I was surrounded by art in my childhood,” states Stephen Goldblatt who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and moved with his family to the United Kingdom at the age of seven; four years later he became obsessed with photography and later as a teenager Goldblatt was hired to work for London Life Magazine owned by the Sunday Times.  “I was working as a photographer when I was 18.  The thing about old style film photojournalism was that you were telling a story in still pictures and not being digital, you tended to try to do it using one roll of film.  At a quickly moving news event one instinctively looked for wide and medium shots, reverses, and faces, trying to turn them into significant images.  I segued out of that into documentaries.   It was the heyday of British documentaries with handheld cameras and that’s how I worked. On a documentary you have to provide the director and editor with sequences and swing with events usually out of your control to get the necessary visual information.”


Watching The 400 Blows (1959) by François Truffaut inspired Stephen Goldblatt to pursue a career in film.  “What made such an impression on me was its reality, the lack of bullshit, and that it was riveting and even true.  It wasn’t about show business.  It was about our lives.  It resonates to this day.  Truffaut’s genius was he could do that and also be entertaining,” The California resident laughs.  “It’s always better in French.”  Of equal influence was the time spent at the Royal College of Art in London where he worked on a series of short films. “Tony [Scott] and I were at the film school [which unfortunately no longer exists] but the combination of film with other disciplines such as painting, sculpture, still photography, and Fine Arts in general were so important.  Ironically, the problem with film school is film itself. What is far more important in my opinion is to hangout with a painter, a still photographer, a sculptor or car designer.  The vast range of human experience is what makes a filmmaker not whether you use the RED camera or still shoot film on an Arriflex 11C.”  The two classmates would collaborate on the directorial debut of Scott, The Hunger (1983) after which America came calling.  “The fact that I worked on The Cotton Club [1984] gave me an incredible opportunity and I’m forever grateful to Francis [Ford Coppola] for that.  I remember I had a key grip named Kenny Goss, an ex-Korean vet who was as different from me as you could ever imagine two human beings but he was so capable and willing to implement my loony ideas in such a workman like collaborative fashion.  As much as I would want to collaborate to help Francis, Kenny would want to help me.  In the American system one department is responsible for all of the grip work instead of three or four as in the UK.”  Goldblatt recalls, “The production office didn’t expect me to last the first day on Cotton Club.  The car that picked me up for the first day of shooting was not booked to take me home.  Everybody thought I would be fired before lunch. The experience was extraordinary.”

     
Other filmmakers would come calling such as John Frankenheimer (Path to War), Barry Levinson (Young Sherlock Holmes), Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon), Alan Pakula (The Pelican Brief), Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever), Barbra Streisand (The Prince of Tides), Mike Nichols (Charlie Wilson’s War), Chris Columbus (Rent), Nora Ephron (Julie & Julia), and Tate Taylor (The Help).  “On my favourites list are those who are collaborative,” notes Stephen Goldblatt.  “In other words I’m interested in Directors who are not particularly interested with the ins and outs of the camera. For example, Mike Nichols is a real master. He gave me tremendous responsibility for setting up a sequence photographically and was content to come to the set and say, ‘What do you have here?’  I would run through the whole sequence and he might comment, ‘Yes. But you’re forcing me to cut when Julia [Roberts] goes through the door. Let’s go through the door with her and go upwards and through the stairs.’ At that point I might go white with fear and he might enquire, ‘What’s the matter?’ I enjoy understanding what is in the head of a director and giving them a surprise with what can be done visually.  I’ve worked with many different directors and have discovered that we all have the same problem.  Deep down, we’re terrified.”


“I don’t want to be partial but for me my experiences with Mike Nichols were so influential and important because I could witness and see how this great theatrical director could bring his insights and abilities with actors into film,” states Stephen Goldblatt who first collaborated with Nichols on the HBO miniseries Angels in America (2003).  “He would insist on rehearsal long before we started shooting.  I was able to bring that to Tate Taylor who is a good actor but when we started doing The Help [2012] was an inexperienced director.  We would sit going over the script and I would say, ‘Listen Tate we have 150 pages for this movie and 58 days to shoot them.  The only way we’re going to manage this is to have rehearsals on location in privacy and without the pressure of the shooting day. In rehearsal we can work out the vast majority of our problems.  Should we light it this way or do it that way?  Is this too much or too little?”  The four decades worth of expertise resulted in Goldblatt receiving a Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.  “I continue to be fascinated by film and I’m not that involved in the technical ups and downs.  I rely on a wonderful crew.  I’ll say, ‘I want to do a crane shot.  I want to start on the girl’s face in the window and then I want to come down the building and then I want the camera to get off the crane and dolly over to the car and then I want to get into the car.’  I don’t say, ‘I need such in such a crane and these kind of mounts.’  One I don’t know and two it’s a waste of my energy and time.  My energy and time has to be with the director and the story so we can get it done.”


Recognition would also come from the Academy Awards as Stephen Goldblatt was lauded with Oscar nominations for The Prince of Tides (1991) and Batman Forever (1995).  “On Batman Forever I used rock’n’roll lighting, computerized setups in a way that is common place nowadays but previously was only used for live shows or Broadway productions.  I brought it onto the film set and at that time it was unique.  The look was strong and Joel [Schumacher] and Peter Macgregor-Scott [The Fugitive], the line producer, really let me go with it.  I think I was nominated for The Prince of Tides in some ways as a recognition of the fact that I survived the film.”  Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl) not being nominated for Best Director while The Prince of Tides contended for Best Picture calls into question the nomination process of the Academy Awards.  “I have to say its absurd.  The whole mechanism by which a movie gets nominated and the director doesn’t is ridiculous.  Laughable.  It demeans the Oscars to be honest. Clearly if a movie is up for Best Picture, the Director is chiefly responsible for it. When Argo [2012], which is a brilliant film wins Best Picture, and the Director is not nominated then the process is obviously broken.”  Goldblatt remarks, “I have no good reason to vote for sound mixing, I probably know a bit more about it than many of my fellow Academy members but I am not an expert.  It’s not my field. Neither should I be voting on hair, costume, make-up or editing.  Really I shouldn’t.  Those members of the Academy who nominate for their own specialty should also be doing the final voting in their own category and that category should not be thrown open to the entire assembly except probably for Best Picture and Best Documentary.  Cinematography awards are now being given to movies which are 75 per cent or more CGI; which is crazy. This is not in anyway to denigrate my colleagues who are so expert with CGI productions but cinematography probably needs two awards: Straight and CGI.


“I’m always being introduced to films that I’ve never heard of,” reveals Stephen Goldblatt.  “I was introduced to the work of a great director who unfortunately was killed on the set a year ago, Theodoros Angelopoulos.  I had never seen his films.  I started to watch.  I watched a very long film called The Travelling Players [1975] and it was clearly made under the most difficult circumstances and tightly budgeted.   There isn’t a shot that ever cuts.  This four hour film is composed of sequences of six to eight minutes shots.  Amazing.  I finished watching it a few days ago.  I’m in absolute awe of the cinematographer and director. That happens again and again.”  Goldblatt enjoys watching screenings at the archive movie theatre the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.  “I would go there to watch an early French film like La Ronde [1950], an original print and I’m blown away by what my colleague managed with limited resources, their imagination and the beauty of the work; that’s always inspiring.”  The fascination carries into recent cinematic offerings.  I saw some superb documentaries this year such as The Gatekeepers [2012], an Israeli documentary, and How to Survive a Plague [2012].  I found many of the documentaries fascinating this year.  I also totally enjoyed the technique and craft of Argo.”


“I do talk to Pixar,” states Stephen Goldblatt when discussing traditional film cinematographers being consulted during the making of computer animated movies.  “I’m friendly with them.  There is some role for visual artists like Roger Deakins [No Country for Old Men] and people like myself.  The way animated films are engineered is that they have 3D modelling but the lighting, colour, and directional light, whether its qualities are soft or hard, are conceived by a virtual cinematography team sometimes working in a vacuum not necessarily attached to reality. Cinematographers spend a lot of time solving the problems of lighting in reality.  They can also contribute to the work of virtual cinematographers. John Seale [The English Patient] is a master of lighting tricks and so is Roger.  I hope that the knowledge doesn’t die with us as we shuffle off but I suppose it will always be reinvented.  I’m not particularly worried.  People are ingenious and will be able to reinvent stuff.”  Goldblatt remarks, “I have never shot an entire film digitally.  I’m about to do that on my next film. The larger problems are rarely concerned with equipment.  Artistically the same questions and difficulties of design, light, camera movement, and visual storytelling occur regardless of the camera package. I have a parallel career as a still photographer which I had abandoned but embraced once more over the last ten years.  I now shoot stills entirely digitally, and apart from the fact that I can have a quick review of the images on the back of the camera and I don’t have to reload film, there is no difference in how I shoot or how I try to get an image.  New technologies in some ways make certain aspects easier and in other ways more difficult.”


“The cinematographer is also a leader on a crew and needs to set a tone for his part of the filming,” believes Stephen Goldblatt.  “We all know that the director can make life exciting and happy on a film or the absolute reverse.  So can a cinematographer.  That’s also part of the job and something to be sensitive about.” Other key attributes include the ability to visually convey the story that the director wants to tell.  “The ability to be practical, to be able to achieve a great look without all the bells and whistles, to get to the heart of a problem and to be companionable with whom you work is important.  That doesn’t mean that you should be a pushover. You have to have a strong point of view regarding the look of a movie. There’s always an impulse during production to take the easy way out. Everybody gets exhausted making a film. A successful cinematographer has to have a strong aesthetic point of view and that’s something to live and die by.”


Many thanks to Stephen Goldblatt for taking the time for this interview.

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.