(hip instrumental beat)
- Hi I'm Carolyn Giardina.
Welcome to the Hollywood Reporter Short Cuts.
I'm here with Robert Richardson,
Roger Deakins, and Caleb Deschanel.
Welcome.
Let's begin to talk about your movies
and the directors that you work with.
Bob, for you, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
was your sixth collaboration with Quentin Tarantino.
How'd the two of you collaborate on the look for this film?
- We went through a conversation about a series of things
that were important to him,
such as previous television series,
because it's based on television actors primarily
and we studied Maverick,
Lancer which is a part of the movie.
We went through a series of others,
Alias Smith and Jones, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
which is not a television sequence,
but Alias Smith and Jones was based upon that.
And a slew of other films, and that's sort of how
we found the basis of what we wanted
for a look of the movie.
- He in there?
- Yeah, just knock.
(knocks)
- Look, just put him in the wardrobe, all right?
What's it gonna hurt?
Then if you need him.
(snaps)
You got him, all right?
- Then I gotta have a conversation with
that wardrobe assistant and man, she's a bitch.
I just don't, please.
- Look, look Randy, I'm asking you to help me out, man.
If the answer's no, the answer's no, not no with excuses.
- He wanted a retro feel with a slight modern twist.
- Okay.
And Roger, you had two films this year,
1917 and The Goldfinch.
In the case of 1917, you re-teamed with Sam Mendes
and you shot the film to look as if
it was one continuous take to have a real-time experience.
Would you talk about how you approached that cinematography?
- With fear and trepidation, really.
First thing, the first line in the script
when I first read it was,
this is conceived as a single take movie,
and I'm, really?
So I was quite kind of nervous about that
and also a bit concerned it was a gimmick, but it's not,
because it's a real-time experience.
- You have a brother in the second battalion.
- Yes sir.
Is he?
- Alive.
And with your help, I'd like to keep it that way.
But they're walking into a trap.
Your orders are to deliver a message
calling off tomorrow morning's attack.
If you don't, we will lose 1,600 men,
your brother among them.
- How did we approach it?
Well, you know.
- Rehearsals.
- Doing that kind of thing, it's so much down to rehearsals
because you can't build a set until you know how long
this trench is and different things.
These characters are always moving,
so you can't build it until you know
how long they're gonna walk for
and when the next piece of action's gonna happen.
So it was quite a long prep process really,
working these things out and then figuring out technically
what equipment to use and how to do each section
'cause quite a lot of them
demanded different kinds of equipment, yeah.
- Sure, sure.
And Caleb in your case, for The Lion King,
when you worked with Jon Favreau,
this was a virtual production.
- [Caleb] Right.
- [Carolyn] A very unique setup,
tell us about shooting in that.
- Well I met with Jon and he told me about the film
and I was sort of nervous about it
because I really had no interest in working
in virtual reality and with computers and everything else
and he assured me that he was interested
in me shooting it because of all my vast experience
shooting live action movies and making things feel realistic
and then I met with Rob Legato,
the visual effects supervisor, and he took me downtown
to this company called Magnopus
and they had these tools that were sort of setup
with some sort of leftover animals from Jungle Book
and we were able to set up some shots
and I suddenly realized that even though I'd be
in virtual reality, I would be setting up the camera
just the way I would in real life
and I started to get excited about it
and we talked about it having kind of a documentary feel
and maybe it'd be long lens and then we went to Africa
for a couple of weeks and we took a long
65 millimeter digital camera and we did a lot of filming
and it was at that point that I suddenly realized
that we didn't need long lenses
because animals actually came very close to us
and we started to develop some ideas
and we looked at a lot of the modern documentaries
like Planet Earth 2 and some of the other films like that
and Jon was right, it was really like making
a live-action movie, so it was really fun.
I really enjoyed working with him
and Rob and everybody on the movie.
- This gorge is where all lions come to find their roar.
- All lions?
Even my dad?
- Even Mufasa came here when he was your age.
Refused to leave until his roar
could be heard above the rim.
- All the way up there?
- That's when you know you've found it.
With a little practice, you'll never be called a cub again.
- Watch this.
(weak roar)
- Did you have a most memorable day on the set?
- Oh they're all memorable days.
I think the most memorable day was when we started using,
we had something called OptiTracks
and we could use the Steadicam on the stage
which was maybe 25 foot by 25 foot,
but we were doing a scene which was Wimoweh
with the characters singing this song
and it was actually very long in terms of movement.
It was probably a hundred yards long and we could not,
if we multiplied the Steadicam to be that far
within the space of 25 feet, it wasn't working,
and then we're thinking about it.
Well wait a second, what if we hook up the floor
to the dolly and we have the dolly on the slope,
which is what the hillside was where they were singing.
So we ended up with the dolly grip dollying along
with the whole platform of the Steadicam
moving down the hill so he could move along with the animals
and then you ended up having to create
this incredible choreography.
It was like a dance between Henry Tirl,
who was our Stedicam operator, and the dolly grip,
who would say, no I'll do that move, you just slow down here
and then I can get closer to the animals here.
It was really fun.
- Most memorable day on set.
What about the two of you?
- They're all memorable.
The thing is, we have to shoot everything in cloud,
'cause otherwise there's no way you can match
from shot to shot, and that's the feel we wanted anyway.
I was so lucky with the weather.
We had two days we didn't get cloud at all, all day,
but we just rehearsed the hell out of it,
and then we caught up the next day,
but every day we got cloud.
- Bob, tell us about one of your favorites.
- Most of my days on the movie
are pretty special, very similar.
I think one of the most memorable for me
was shooting the Playboy Mansion,
because it was a huge amount of energy within the scene.
Margot's movement and the dance
and the colors and just the freedom.
That was pretty immense for me, that day.
- Would you talk about working
with your production designers?
- A production designer is what we all need,
cinematographers, and I have a strong belief
that the better the production designer is,
the better our work will be because they help propel
and help aid us in how we grade our scenes,
in terms of how we light our scenes,
how they're actually able to be staged
and I was extraordinarily fortunate
working with Barbara Ling on this particular film.
She knew L.A. extremely well, she was there in the '60s.
She captured it perfectly along with Quentin's memories,
they just worked in perfect sync
and I do believe production designers
are absolutely vital to cinematographers
and the creation of great work.
- Yeah, they really determine what we're able to film
and so, on The Lion King, James Chinlund
was the production designer and you may look at the movie
and go, well what's the production design?
But everything in that movie, where the watering hole is,
where the elephant graveyard is, the cave that Scar is in
has two openings so we could light it in particular ways
and create the shadow of Scar moving in and out of light.
It was really wonderful to work with someone like him.
- You have such a wide variety of tools available
to you to tell your stories now.
What do you think of the state of stories?
Is there a range of scripts available to you?
- I'm about to head into another film called,
well it's based on Venom.
It's the second Venom with Tom Hardy,
but it's a character that doesn't exist,
his secondary character,
so a lot of it's going to be visual effects
in terms of trying to determine how they interact
and it's something I've never done.
This is the first time for me doing something
this interactive between characters.
- Something I wanted to talk about also is,
this year the American Society of Cinematographers
is celebrating its centennial
and the three of you hold the distinction
of having received its Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Is that true?
(everyone laughs)
- I remember.
- Would you share your thoughts on the state of your art?
- Well I think it's evolving very quickly now.
When you go see foreign language films, in the past,
when films arrive from a really small, obscure country,
they were usually shot in 16 millimeter
and the quality wasn't that good,
but with the evolution of digital technology,
it's really remarkable that films
from the most obscure place in the world,
the quality has really gone up quite a lot
and I think that's gonna continue to evolve
and I think we'll be surprised by the number
of wonderful filmmakers that come out in the future
who otherwise would not have had the chance to make films.
- With entirely new perspectives on aesthetic.
Because many people are shooting, framing off of iPhones
or whatever their methodology is.
They're not looking through eyepieces.
It's changing the way they compose.
There's this entire change of language
is gonna take more and more part, I think, in the future,
that is evident now when I watch and work with people
that operate and they come in on second camera
and they don't want the eyepiece, they want the monitor,
and I say lets put the eyepiece back on.
Keep the monitor.
- You're so old fashioned, Bob.
- I am old fashioned, but I do believe that the idea,
what happens with the eyepiece is, one eye closes
and the other eye is focused on what you're aiming at.
If you have both eyes available to you,
you're scanning a world, and it's very difficult
to put your concentration into the very thing
you're supposed to be shooting.
And we have to see in close contact
what an actor's giving back to you.
So for me, I understand when I'm down here and you want this
and with the digital world we've been given that access
in a brand new way which you couldn't really do
in the film world as easily.
So I think there are changes,
and some of 'em are positive, some of 'em are negative.
- Would each of you share a lesson that you learned
early in your career that stuck with you?
- I have something.
- Okay.
- When I was doing The Black Stallion, we were in Toronto,
and I was working with Carroll Ballard
and even though I knew Carroll to be a wonderful director
and I really loved working with him,
my crew was sort of getting this feeling
that he was making this stupid children's movie
that was just gonna be worthless and everything
and it was like trying to keep my crew going
and I was really ready to quit the movie at a certain point
because of all the strangeness of carrying everybody.
No, no, he's a great director,
it's gonna be a wonderful movie,
and I remember complaining to the sound man,
who was sort of an old time New York sound man
who had been brought up to do the film
and he says, oh you young kids,
you don't know anything about making movies,
you all think it's about making art,
it's not about making art, it's starting a movie
and getting through to the end and finishing it,
that's when you find out if it's art or not,
and it's something that's always stayed with me,
that you just have to get everyday done
and not let anything deter you and I think it's served well.
- Interesting.
Bob?
- I was shooting a shot of Tommy Lee Jones walking down,
it was during Natural Born Killers,
and as I made the pan to push them into
a corridor inside a prison, I ran into a cell,
and the camera smashed up against my eye
and this golf ball of blood popped up
and I couldn't see, and I looked over
and Oliver was looking at me like, well there goes our day.
I turned to the doctor and I said lance it now.
They cut it, butterflied it and we just kept shooting.
What that taught me was that just continuing
to just give all you can whenever you can,
that's an extreme example of what you have to do
but I think in our lives we have to be devoted
to the art at a very high level,
and if that requires that or requires anything
to be able to continue, you have to continue and persevere.
- Roger?
- Well I've got no story like that.
(everyone laughs)
Hell, no.
I shot 1984 with Richard Burton
and I remember sitting with him one lunchtime just chatting
and I realized, he said as much, how nervous he was
on the shoot because, he said, we were all so young
and I was so nervous, it was my first kind of big-ish film
and working with with him, I was just like whoa.
I was so nervous and then I realized, they're all nervous,
everybody's nervous, it's not just me.
The actors are nervous, whoever they are,
it doesn't matter, they're still nervous.
If you care about your job, you're nervous, I think anyway.
- Same way.
- Well said.
Okay, thank you so much for joining us.
- Sure.
- I thank you.
(hip instrumental beat)