12th ANNUAL ASC AWARDS
Movie of the Week or Pilot
WILLIAM WAGES, ASC - Winner
Buffalo Soldiers
Georgia resident William Wages, ASC earned his second consecutive ASC Award this year for Buffalo Soldiers. He garnered last year's trophy, as well as a Cable ACE Award, for Riders of the Purple Sage (see AC May '97). The cinematographer has enjoyed a fortuitous collaboration with director Charles Haid, and Buffalo Soldiers is the duo's sixth film together it is also Wages' sixth ASC Award-nominated work. He earned previous nods in 1988 for Gore Vidal's Lincoln, in 1990 for both Caroline and Voices Within: The Story of Truddi Chase, Part II (AC May '91) and then in 1991 for the series I'll Fly Away (AC May '92). Wages has also photographed such feature films as Down in the Delta, Love Potion No. 9, In the Army Now and Iron Will.
For Buffalo Soldiers, Wages and Haid approached the material in a very different manner than they had on Riders of the Purple Sage. The cinematographer notes, "Riders was much more of a classic western, while Buffalo Soldiers is the story about how the white establishment of the late 1800s tried to use African-American Civil War veterans of the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry to perform genocide on the Native Americans. It's a brutal and true story, so we decided to tell it in a very straightforward way, not glamorizing anything and not holding anything back. Basically, it's just in-your-face [photographically].
"The lighting style was realistic as well, so that it would look real and not lit which meant that for the most part, it was not a hard-light style. We very seldom live in a hard-light world, and they certainly didn't back then, unless you were outdoors."
In crafting a stark tone for this untold story, Wages was initially concerned with rendering the dark-skinned actors' facial details accurately while they were shadowed under the wide brims of their hats. "Almost any cinematographer will tell you that one of the most difficult things to do is photograph African-Americans in the desert with hats on," he opines. "It's a delicate balance to keep the facial detail and yet not allow things to look 'lit.' A lot of the scenes that are outdoors in the daytime are in fact extremely lit. There's a lot of lighting going on that is hopefully invisible.
"During prep, I did an across-the-board, unbiased test of every available Fuji and Kodak film stock, to see which gave me the most shadow detail under these conditions," he explains. "I didn't select my film stock for a specific rendering of a gritty reality, but for the widest latitude. In my tests, I shot a stand-in wearing a hat in the desert with all of the stocks, just changing the magazines for the same exact shot, and I ended up using Fuji's tungsten F-250 8551, which had the most latitude. I love the new Vision stocks and use Kodak all the time, but for this particular film and this particular look, the Fuji 8551 was the way to go. Black people have wonderful tonal ranges in their faces, and this stock captures them."
Despite the Fuji stock's latitude, Wages still paid particular attention his levels of fill lighting while shooting on the production's blazing Arizona locations. "I used a lot of 12' by 12' bounces with muslin and what we called a 'microwave,' which is a sheet of material with silver lamé on one side and white on the other," he details. "I usually had the grips string one of those up, because that way I had the option of using either side. I used the white side most of the time. The white is a bright white, but it has a dull finish unlike a Griffolyn, which is shiny. Actually, the Griffolyns used to be dull when they first came out, but they've changed the way they make them, so I don't used them very often."
SHELLY JOHNSON
Louisa May Alcott's The Inheritance
Shelly Johnson was previously nominated for an ASC Award in 1989 for Everybody's Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure (see AC May 1990). A graduate of Art Center College of Design (where he studied film with fellow classmate Don Burgess, ASC), Johnson began his career as a gaffer. After advancing to cinematographer, he quickly amassed an extensive list of television credits, including Stephen King's The Shining, Devil's Pay, Alien Nation: Millennium, Tell Me No Secrets, In the Line of Duty: Kidnapped, Saint Maybe, Quicksilver Highway, and Alien Nation: Body and Soul. Johnson's feature credits include Maid to Order, Nightflyers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, Native Son and Amanda.
The Inheritance was the 10th film that Johnson has made with director Bobby Roth. The cinematographer notes, "After 10 films together, Bobby and I have things very much down to a shorthand. He pushes television to such a marvelous extreme more than I've seen any other director do and I relish every moment that I can help him do that.
"The Inheritance is a period piece set in 1865, and the single element that inspired the look the most was the painting style of Gustav Caillebotte. There happened to be a Caillebotte exhibition right before we were shooting it was perfect timing, and got us thinking about the kind of visual identity we wanted our movie to have.
"What struck us most about Caillebotte's work was his use of an asymmetrical frame and his principals of composition. I also studied his use of shadow and color. A lot of Caillebotte's work seemed to lean toward color tones; knowing that Bobby has a penchant for warmer tones, I chose to layer my shadows with tones of yellow. So on this particular project we talked very generally about Caillebotte's paintings and the environment we wanted to create. We then went over the script and discussed the emotional impact of each scene and how we could use these textural elements to differentiate mood and the telling of the story."
Since The Inheritance was set before the advent of electricity, Johnson relied on naturalistic illumination motivated through the use of daylight and candlelight. "There is an extraordinary amount of candlelight," submits the cinematographer. "While simultaneously telling the story, we felt it was very important to have a sense of the environment in order to have an understanding of the characters. When we first talked about using candlelight, I was initially thrilled and then apprehensive. We decided not to light scenes with actual candles, but to light so that it would appear as if candles were lighting the scene. My feeling was that if I used candles as a source light, I would have had to go with faster film stock than I wanted to use. Looking at the work of Caillebotte, I decided early on to go with Eastman's 200 ASA 5287 stock which I rated at 160. [Ed. Note: 5287 was discontinued last year and replaced with low-con 5277 Vision 320T.] That ruled out using candles as our actual sources. Otherwise, I also felt that we would be forced to place the candles where they'd be needed for exposure purposes, instead of placing them where they worked best for us dramatically.
"I had previously used 87 on a feature and was very impressed with the way it layered the blacks," he adds. "I found that by overexposing slightly and printing it down, the blacks became even, neat, and crisp, which I found very pleasing. I felt that we could work in more shadowed tones and be able to apply color to those areas, which I don't think we could have done with any other film stock while maintaining the blacks."
JACEK LASKUS
The Garden of Redemption
Polish-born director of photography Jacek Laskus was drawn to cinematography by an early appreciation of photography and art. After graduating high school, he enrolled in the cinematography program at the famed Polish Film Academy. Part of his curriculum was to spend his summers working as a camera intern, but it was Haskell Wexler, ASC's documentary-flavored drama Medium Cool that opened his eyes to a more liberated style of camerawork and inspired him to move to the U.S. After emigrating, he begin working on documentaries, later moved into independent film production in New York, and shot his first feature, Parting Glances.
Laskus was later nominated for an ASC Award in 1988 for the telefilm The Cain Mutiny Court Martial, and received a Cable ACE Award for Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread. His other credits include Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, One Man Standing, Stepfather II and Incident At Dark River.
The Garden of Redemption was Laskus' second collaboration with director Tom Donnelly (they had previously made the cable move Blindsided and have since produced Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong). "I think Tom and I found that we complemented each other on the set, and we had a good time doing Blindsided. Tom wrote The Garden of Redemption, which is a period film set at the end of World War II in Italy. The film is kind of a forbidden love story between a peasant girl and a priest who is hiding from the war behind his robe and the church. The story is about how the two characters change each other's lives in the final days of German occupation of this little town.
"Tom and I looked for locations very early on, and found that we could accomplish what we needed to do in Portugal, using a little town to double for Italy," Laskus reveals. "We had a 23-day schedule, so I tried to create the flavor of Italy while still striving to connect with an American audience. It had to have a certain look that would combine a European aesthetic with American filmmaking polish."
To achieve this goal, Laskus brought in people from all over the world, including Irish operator Des Whelan, Israeli gaffer Gettier Nimrod, and an exceptional electrical crew from Portugal. "We had producers who understood how to maneuver the money so that there would be a lot of value put on the screen," the cinematographer says. "We also had very good actors who did almost everything in two takes. All of that allowed us to rehearse the scene and have time to light, so I didn't have to compromise as much as I normally would have to. About 98 percent of what we shot is on the screen; we were efficient in shooting only what was essential."
In re-creating WWII-era Italy, Laskus first made some artistic decisions on how the film should be shot. "I wanted to be respectful to the time period," he states. "For example, I used Cooke lenses. I felt that using the older glass with certain focal lengths and not going wider or longer than those focal lengths would give me the same types of restrictions that had been placed upon actual films from that period. That meant never using a 10mm or a 300mm lens, for example. Of course, I occasionally broke those rules, but I tried to do it as seldom as possible. In certain situations we put a zoom on because it was quicker and easier for exterior work.
"Although The Garden of Redemption is a war story, I wanted to create the softness of a love story. Therefore, my lenses were softer and I used filtration that would add some softness. However, the stock I used was primarily EXR 5293, which is contrasty with strong blacks. We also tried to find angles that weren't too modern and used much longer cuts, which gave the film more of a European feeling. So there was a bit of a balance between both modern and classic techniques.
"This concept applied to the lighting as well. I felt that the lighting should be more classical in a way, with the feeling of a 1950s movie. For example, I didn't want to use blue light at night. I felt I should be looking perhaps more towards German expressionistic lighting, so that the look would be a bit more sourcey and dramatic."
MIKE SOUTHON, BSC
Snow White: A Tale of Terror
The current president of the British Society of Cinematographers, Mike Southon, BSC earned his first ASC Award nomination with Snow White: A Tale of Terror. Asked what drew him to choose filmmaking as a career, he replies, "It just kind of came naturally as I was growing up. I got my first 8mm movie camera when I was 13 or 14 years old, but even before that I was always playing around with projectors and all sorts of optical toys. So it's hard to say where the attraction came from it just always was there."
After finishing school, Southon broke into the industry by working on educational television programs. He then applied for one of just six camera intern positions at the BBC, and was selected from a pool of over 3,500 other applicants. "At that time, the BBC had a film department with more than 70 film crews," relates Southon. "Anything that was shot outside of their main, dinosaur-like television studios was shot on 16mm film, because there was no kind of affordable tape back then. I was lucky enough to get in there, which meant that I spent a year as a trainee for second AC. As a trainee, you went to every single department in the BBC for a couple of weeks and just worked your way up through the system. I then started going on the road with the crews; after a year, you either made it or you didn't."
After making his mark as a documentary cameraman on projects such as the non-fiction series Hospital, Southon soon found his true calling and began shooting narrative films. His feature credits include Air Bud, Gothic, The Run of the Country, The Final Cut, Little Man Tate, Paperhouse, A Kiss Before Dying and Wuthering Heights. Southon has also shot hundreds of commercials and music videos.
Southon was immediately drawn to Snow White: A Tale of Terror because the script presented a much darker rendition of the familiar fairy tale. "The script was about somebody who is driven by an obsession which leads her to do the most awful things," he notes. "In this case, the obsessive person is the stepmother, played by Sigourney Weaver. She notices Snow White's beauty and the influence she has on people which begins to threaten the notion of her own beauty. Jealousy then begins to rot away her morality.
"The story is told in a Gothic, fairy tale context, so it became fairly obvious where I would go with it visually. I had many discussions about the look with production designer Gemma Jackson. I'm a great believer in having a very close relationship with the production designer. If you don't get that right, then you can't visually connect on a movie. Gemma quite was interested in a medieval look, with pale faces on the women, rugged faces on the men, and costumes that reflected European paintings from the story's general period, which we felt was between 1700 and 1800.
"The other two things that fascinated me about the structure of the script was that the movie starts off in an icy environment Snow White is actually born in the snow but then in the end, the stepmother is destroyed by fire. In a sense, the fire consumes her in the same way that her obsession has consumed her. Therefore, I knew that I had two temperatures to work with: this frozen quality at one end, with the extraordinary notion of birth in that cold climate, and this death-by-fire at the end. I tried to echo that duality in the film via the colors. Even in the warmest room, I wanted to have icy fingers creeping up the window panes, so that viewers would always be aware of the presence of both temperatures.
"I tried to be very true to light sources," he continues, "so I used a lot of candles and torchlight. Also, much of the picture was shot on some wonderful sets that Gemma created, which had some pretty dramatic painted backdrops that we could show outside windows. I asked her not to make the backdrops specifically sunny or overcast, so that I could enhance them with lighting rather than just flat-lighting them. That way, I could put a lot more light on the sky areas and control the density on the ground areas, which allowed us to get a lot of very different looks outside and emotionally echo what was going on in the scenes. Of course, when things get bad in the story, the skies darken and storms gather, and it's a bit easier to create that if you have a reasonably blank canvas with which to work."
BING SOKOLSKY
Oliver Twist
Bing Sokolsky earned his fourth ASC Award nomination for his work on director Tony Bill's adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic Oliver Twist. He earned two 1993 ASC Award nominations for his depiction of tough New York cops on the N.Y.P.D. Blue pilot, as well as the episode "True Confessions" (see AC May '94). He was also nominated last year for his efforts on High Incident (AC May '97). Sokolsky's other credits include the pilots for Three, Me and Nick and Beauty; the MOWs Doing Time On Maple Drive and The Tower; and the HBO feature Black Cat Run. Sokolsky has also done second-unit camerawork on Star Trek: First Contact, Strange Days and A Low Down Dirty Shame, each of which was principally photographed by Matthew Leonetti, ASC.
After being telephoned on a Thursday by Oliver Twist's producer, who asked him to board on a plane to Ireland the next morning, Sokolsky arrived that Saturday to take over shooting of the film, which was then five days into production. He immediately met with the project's various department heads, looked at what had been shot, and then worked for 15 days straight without having even read the script. "I just jumped into it," relates Sokolsky, who had worked with director Bill on two episodes on High Incident. "Most of us know the Dickens story, and there have been a few other remakes. David Lean's black-and-white version [1948, shot by Guy Green, BSC] is really the blueprint, but I wanted to do something different. While we were shooting, I told Tony, 'I've done color, I've done black-and-white, but no one has done a sepiatone look, especially on television.' He loved the idea, so we desaturated the entire picture and then gave it sort of a chocolate wash. I met my colorist, J.R. Benson of 4MC, on this project, and have since used him exclusively because I think he's one of the best. He brought a lot to the plate in creating the look of the show. When I told him what I wanted to do, his eyes lit up and he basically gave up his vacation to do the film."
Prior to Sokolsky's participation in the project, it had been decided to shoot Oliver Twist in Super 16, which didn't altogether thrill the cinematographer. "I'm not that fond of Super 16 because of the lens selection," he says. "When you're dealing with 16mm, the format is a 2:1 ratio to 35mm in terms of focal lengths. For example, if you were shooting an actress with a 100mm lens in 35mm, you'd have to use a 50mm lens in 16mm, which isn't the sweetest lens to use. On close-ups, you normally want to elongate the faces by using the longest lens possible. When you start using wide lenses, you begin distorting the face and doing the exact opposite. In 16mm, the main three lenses you're using, especially in a practical location where you can't pull walls, are a 12mm, 16mm and 25mm. That's just a disaster, because the 12mm still distorts like a 12mm, and it made things very difficult.
On the positive side, he notes, "I've traveled all over the world, and Ireland is one the most beautiful countries I've ever been to. In particular, the light is unbelievable. You can't point the camera in a wrong direction. I knew as soon as I got there what I wanted to do in terms of the look. I was inspired by the paintings of Vermeer and Georges de La Tour, using hard light with lots of dark blacks and sourcey highlights. The one thing about shooting in Ireland is that even if you're at high noon, it looks as if it's eight or nine in the morning. The light was always pretty low, so we basically had backlight 90 to 95 percent of the day. That was a major factor in terms of the exteriors, because on a tight television schedule you have to keep shooting no matter what time of day it is."
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