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Elmes:
How did you and your grips plan the rigging for the cars and the shots you wanted? And how did you decide what could be process trailers and what had to be done for real?
Suschitzky:
If the scene concerned the actors in the car, we would definitely use the process trailer, but if we had to see the car come into frame, we would naturally use the real thing. My gaffer and I tried to think of different ways to enhance the sense of movement with the lighting. We were generally shooting at very low light levels, so we came up with a rig that involved a reflector and a lamp or two shining into it. By either moving the reflector or the lamps, plus some additional lamps that were panned in and out at the sides, we got a satisfactory effect. Sometimes it would be too hard and spotty, and you could even see the joins in the reflector material, but it usually worked. Those were mostly tungsten lights.
We were primarily working with very small, lightweight sources, although for the exterior scene in which some characters re-create James Dean's car crash for an audience, we did use a Musco Light. Unfortunately, it burned straight through the gel frames that we had spent hours putting up on it, and the scene looks much bluer than I had intended. I actually don't like that electric blue look - it's a mistake in the movie.
Daviau:
There is so much car work in this film that I had to wonder how much was poor-man's process.
Suschitzky:
Well, not much. In fact the only shots done with poor-man's process were the detail shots of the dashboard, or things of that nature. As I'm sure you've gathered, there were a number of risky things to shoot on this film, in terms of the car work. The rain scene at the end of the picture was done with the Motocam system, which is basically a motorcycle with a sidecar. It allowed us to get the camera really low, and it's a powerful bike, so it's very maneuverable.
Elmes:
What I liked in your car work was the wonderful use of reflections and reminders of the world going by. So although we're looking at the people inside of this claustrophobic capsule, we see things passing by, sometimes just inches away. There were several times during the chase scene when the camera swept between cars and ended up only a foot or two off the bumper of the Lincoln.
Suschitzky:
[Laughs.] We had some excitement shooting that particular sequence. The elevated freeway we were using was incomplete, so it only ran for a distance before coming to a very abrupt end. We were using this stretch in both directions. And this was fine if you are in the normal, 'correct' direction. Well, on one shot, our driver had forgotten that he was going in the 'wrong' direction - at night, in the rain, on this incomplete freeway - and we missed the off-ramp and were suddenly faced with a precipice. We had to scream for him to stop because we were just a few yards from the end of the ramp; we came very close to going over the edge!
Very few people realize how long it takes to set up a shot on a car.
Elmes:
This is very true, as I found out during my experience on Night on Earth. When Jim Jarmusch conceived the film, he thought of sets and set pieces in connection with performances. Well, having two or three actors in a car was like, 'I've got 'em! They're not going anywhere!' But he didn't fully realize the complexity of keeping it visually alive.
Daviau:
I absolutely loved some of the high-from-outside angles you got in Crash. Consider them stolen! [Laughs.] One of the most stilted and overused angles in car photography is the two-shot of the front seat from the hood or towing vehicle. God forbid there are people in the back seat. I once got a director who let me do a car sequence strictly with profiles. It worked really well, because I was able to use the entire hood for the lighting-effect rigs; I've just never bought the old dashboard-light method, because it is both so restrictive and artificial.
A good deal of Crash takes place at night. Did you base a lot of your decisions on the texture of the film stock that would have the speed to do that, and how you'd carry it through the day's scenes?
Suschitzky:
My process of finding a look for a film comes directly from the material. The direction which I take may change once I see the locations, the actors, the costumes - with each bit of detail - and finally the performances. Earlier in my career I might have fooled myself by saying, 'On this film, go grainy and use bounced light and make it very naturalistic.' But I've settled into a simpler, more instinctual way of working now.
My initial thought about Crash was that it was a very bleak, hard story. While it might sound simplistic, I wanted to photograph the picture to look harsher that I normally would do things. The last film I did with David was M. Butterfly, which was more romantic, gentle and lush in tone. I know that this new picture looks different from that one, but stepping back I can also see this sort of line I have taken from one film to the next.
One doesn't expect an actor to be completely different from role to role. They are cast because of the qualities they have or can give, and I feel that's also true for directors of photography. We can get typecast, but we also get cast because of the material we have behind us.
I wanted to make Crash more contrasty and hard, although sometimes I wonder if I went too far with that. Looking at it tonight I wondered if it was occasionally too unfriendly and ugly. But I suppose it's suitable for the story.
Daviau:
It is, absolutely. Of course, people will want to know what kinds of tests you did to arrive at that choice.
Suschitzky:
I did do tests, primarily because we were shooting so much at night. But my choice [for the nighttime work] was really only between two stocks, the Kodak high-speed [5296] and the Fuji high-speed [8571] - Crash was shot before 98 became available. I instantly preferred the Fuji. It had much tighter grain and it was much sharper - and not quite as contrasty - at the same speeds. I think the same is still true when it is compared to 98.
Having chosen this 500 ASA Fuji stock, my original intention was to shoot the rest of the film on Kodak. On a sequence change, you'd never notice the difference. But as I thought about it, I considered the fact that our budget was very tight on money, so I asked the production manager to do a price comparison. He came back to me and said, 'I'm not asking you to shoot the film on Fuji, but we would save quite a lot of money.' So I decided to test Fuji's other stocks, and although I couldn't say instinctively that they were better than [what Kodak offered], they compared well.
Elmes:
Did you do any pushing?
Suschitzky:
I almost never push film, because I think it's always better to underexpose than push; that's just my preference. But there was one scene at the end of the picture - Vaughan and Ballard are driving on the rainy freeway at night - that we couldn't light at all. The area we were covering was just too big, so we shot it with available streetlights. It didn't require pushing, but I really didn't know what was going to happen. I just thought, 'Well, something is got to come out.' We had headlights, we had rain, and we had all the reflections that those elements created. There were several locations in which available light took part.
Daviau:
Certainly one of the problems you must have had was in blending the available light with the prosthetic makeup that the actors wore. I thought the makeup work was excellent, but I can just imagine dealing with fluorescent, sodium-vapor and mercury-vapor sources.
Elmes:
That must have really played havoc. With rubber prosthetics, you never know how they will look until you photograph them. The sharp close-ups looked terrific.
Daviau:
Which lenses were you using?
Suschitzky:
We were on Primos, without any filtration.
Daviau:
Would you say that you shot a thinner negative than you normally would?
Suschitzky:
On some of the night scenes, yes.
Daviau:
And I assume you were using the 'appropriate' stock for your conditions, such as the 100 ASA stock for daylight exteriors?
Suschitzky:
When I could. But sometimes during the daytime we still had to rely on the faster stocks, especially in the garage locations or under overpasses. One example is the scene early on in which Ballard arrives to inspect his wrecked car at the impound lot. That location was all in the shadows under a freeway structure. We used the medium-speed Fuji stock for that sequence - 250 ASA [8551] - but we were still wide open because the weather was so bad. It was freezing cold - down to -8�C - throughout the shoot, and often overcast.
Elmes:
You certainly had some brave actors.
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