For the next few years, Storaro studied Mozart, Rembrandt, Faulkner, Vermeer and Caravaggio, among other artists. Finally, in late 1963, a camera operator with whom he had worked asked Storaro to take a step backward and work as his first assistant on an upcoming feature, the second effort of a young director. "I decided it would be too arrogant to feel that because I was a camera operator yesterday, I couldn’t be an assistant today," he recalls.
The director was Bernardo Bertolucci, and the film was Before the Revolution. "My first impression of Bernardo was that he had incredible knowledge, especially for someone so young," Storaro says. "Every shot was perfectly laid down and structured. He knew exactly how he wanted to use the camera. In my mind, he was the ideal director, but he was very young, and he kind of put himself on a pedestal. He had a certain kind of arrogance."
After that experience, Storaro went back to work as a camera operator. He also collaborated with Camillo and Luigi Bazzoni on a series of short films. The government funded some of these, while the filmmakers financed others themselves. Storaro did some of the writing, but he mainly served as camera operator; he also did a lot of the cinematography.
At the end of 1967, Storaro worked as camera operator on a film with some "difficult and very complicated shots," but the mystery was gone. He told the director that for the first time, he didn’t feel any emotion; it was like being a robot. It was time for him to take the next step.
Storaro earned his first cinematography credit for Franco Rossi’s black-and-white film Giovinezza, Giovinezza (Youthful, Youthful) in 1968. "I finally felt that I could tell a full story," he remembers. "It was a complete journey using all of the language of light, darkness and contrast. It was like your first love. I cried for two days before the movie was over because I knew it was going to finish, and I would never experience that emotion again if I photographed a million other films that were 100,000 times bigger."
In 1969, Storaro was at work on his second film as a cinematographer Dario Argento’s L’Uccello Dalle Piume de Cristallo (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage), when Bertolucci called and said he wanted to meet to discuss his next project. "I had dreamed about getting a call like that from Bernardo," Storaro recalls, "but I also promised myself that if I opened the door and saw that look of arrogance still on his face, I would close the door and walk away. [But] our meeting was wonderful."
Their first collaboration was La Strategia del Ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem), a film for Italian television. Soon afterwards, Bertolucci called to arrange a meeting to talk about another film, The Conformist. Bertolucci opened that meeting by telling Storaro that the cinematographer would have to use another camera operator. "He had just given me the script for The Conformist, and I said, ’Well, I understand what you are saying and I respect you,’" Storaro recalls. "I gave him the script, said goodbye and stepped out the door. He followed me into the corridor and said, ’Wait a minute. Let’s talk.’ I proposed that we start the picture with my operator, Enrico Umetelli, and if he wasn’t satisfied after a week, I would listen. The three of us have [since] worked together on many pictures!"
Storaro was 30 and Bertolucci was 29 when they collaborated on The Conformist in 1970. The film seemed to turn a new page in the art of filmmaking (see Q & A on page 84), and its impact was profound and widespread. John Bailey, ASC recalls that he was a college student in 1971 and was unsure of which path to follow until he saw The Conformist. He then decided to make cinematography his life’s work.
Owen Roizman, ASC had just finished shooting The French Connection when he and his wife went to see The Conformist. He recalls, "I said to her, ’I’ll never be able to do work like this. I’d better get out of this business now.’ I felt totally intimidated."
Kenneth Zunder, ASC observes that an entire generation of cinematographers was influenced by Storaro’s work in that film, and that their work is now influencing the next generation. "I think in that film, [Storaro] was the first contemporary cinematographer to allow scenes to play in the shadows," Zunder says. "His influence is pervasive. Years ago, when I was shooting thirtysomething [at the beginning of my own career], the producers told me it was okay to play people in the shadows and to let actors off the edge of the frame. They said, ’Let the images tell as much of the story as the script and actors.’ All of us have benefitted from the pioneering [work] that Vittorio did."
Apocalypse Now was Storaro’s first Hollywood film and marked the beginning of his collaboration with Coppola (see Q & A on page 94). During the opening scenes of this epic Vietnam War film, colors are almost monochrome. Then, as the conflict moves deeper into the jungle, Storaro imposes an unnatural color (red) on a natural one (green) to visually represent the escalation of the conflict. By the end of the film, the use of color borders on surrealism.
A few months ago, almost a dozen years after Storaro shot Apocalypse Now, he was in a telecine suite with colorist Lou Levinson supervising the transfer of the film to DVD. Levinson was working on a scene shot on a wide river cutting through the jungle, and there was a slight orange mist floating on the river. "Make that a little more red," Storaro said, "but keep the green the same. More red. More. Can you keep the green the same? Wait. That’s right."
Watching this process was like observing an artist transferring tiny dabs of paint from his palette onto a canvas. To a casual observer, the images on the video monitor were only subtly different, and the changes as imperceptible as a gentle breeze that doesn’t stir a hair. But each shot was a thread in the overall fabric of the film, and when all of the threads were in place, the subtle adjustments amplified the texture of the story.
Storaro believes that all movies are a resolution of a conflict between light and shadows. Light reveals the truth, and shadows obscure it. In early scenes of The Last Emperor, Pu Yi (the emperor) is isolated in the Hidden City, shielded from knowledge of the outside world. During this period, the emperor is always cloaked in shadows even during brightly lit exterior scenes, in which servants hold umbrellas over his head. Sunlight never touches his face until Pu Yi begins to understand that there is an outside world.
Storaro uses colors like a language. "There is no doubt that every color is a specific wavelength of energy that can represent or symbolize a specific time of life," he explains. "The meanings of colors are universal, even if they have different meanings in different cultures. Even if the audience doesn’t see the meanings of different colors, they can feel them."
[ continued on page 3 ]