Training the Eye

I got my first stills camera when I was eleven or twelve years old – and I’ve still got it. It was a point-and-shoot with a built-in flash. I think you got twelve shots per roll of film. I still print off that film today, and the quality is fantastic, because the negative is so big. There was one little switch that put a filter in front of the lens if the daylight was very bright – but pretty much all of my shots came out okay. If you think about the amount of time that directors of photography on movies spend with light meters … With your first camera, you just pointed it at something and took a photograph.

I then got hold of a very old 35mm camera, a Leica with a fixed lens – itself 35mm, fairly wide – and I shot some stuff on that. But it wasn’t until I got a Nikon camera, and a long zoom lens, that I started taking portraits of people. If you take someone’s portrait on a long lens, the subject is very sharp while everything in the background and foreground is soft. You start to get abstract shapes forming behind and in front of the subject. And suddenly you realise this is a whole different way of looking at things – an artificial way, because the eye doesn’t function like that. And you realise these are the images you see in films – in war films, say, or any films that want to generate a kind of tension. You realise this is a particular ‘look’. And you ask yourself: how do I get this look?

If you then start shooting film on a professional 16mm film camera such as the Aaton, and you get yourself a set of long lenses – well, the look you get when you gaze through the Aaton viewfinder is the same as what you got from the Nikon. Suddenly, as you shoot, you’re connecting with the prospect of an image, with a ‘look’. You sense that what you see is what you’re going to get. And just by moving the focus ring, you start to get the power to control the image within the camera. So you begin to build up a kind of language of cinematography – and when you start writing descriptions of long-lens shots into your scripts, it shows you have a very clear idea of what you want the film to look like as you are writing it.

I came to these realisations as a result of having shot on a good 35mm stills camera, and then shooting 16mm film on the Aaton. And I would say that as part of your education as a film-maker, the more time you spend with cameras the better it is for you. Whether it’s a still camera, movie camera, digital camera, it’s best to become so familiar with the camera that it becomes second nature to you. Every camera has a certain look and gives you a certain feel, and you begin to assimilate certain things unconsciously. Not only are you training your eye by how you use the camera, but you’re developing an instinct for what it is you want to achieve. If you’ve achieved a certain effect through a stills camera, it’s because you’ve made yourself familiar with that camera’s mechanism. And if you know that’s what you want, you can then take a digital camera and you can customise it in the same way – like making an extra limb for the camera.

Innovation by Accident

It was Sony, the great innovator, who came up with DAT – digital audio tape, a tiny but highly sophisticated tape. The first record-and-playback DAT machines were very well made, very robust, professional machines, not cheap but not fearfully expensive. And almost immediately the industry accepted it: DAT became the format for mastering sound. Certain engineers whom I talked to at the time were horrified. ‘The quality’s great, but where’s your security? This is a tiny piece of tape in a plastic box …’ – whereas before, you were using really big four-inch-wide master tapes. DAT wasn’t invented as something to take over as the mastering format for recorded sound, but that’s the way innovation works.

I feel the same thing has happened with video cameras, just because the domestic cameras now available are so good. For example, a reasonably priced DV camera that you buy in a store today is a better camera than an incredibly expensive hi-tech professional camera from ten years ago. There is no comparison in price. Technology has just moved on. Ten years ago the professional camera was entirely out of reach to anyone other than millionaires. And now we have these things that are almost disposable.

It’s phenomenal – because up until this new digital era, the technology of film really had not shifted since the 1930s. It just became more sophisticated. Moviemaking technology was a lot like sewing-machine technology, and it worked fine – and continues to work fine. There had been no real breakthroughs – except, say, Dolby sound, or the invention of the Steadicam. Dolby was invented to deal with the inherent problem of hiss – white noise – on analogue tape. With digital technology we don’t have analogue hiss any more, yet we’ve become addicted to the sound of Dolby, which is a certain kind of enhanced artificial sound. We accept that now as cinema sound, as ‘reality’. It’s not. But even though we don’t really need Dolby technology any more, we’re stuck with it. It’s part of the deal if you make a film now.

A lot of the resistance to the new digital technology is coming from entrenched big business. In 2000 I shot a film called Hotel on four Sony PD100 digital cameras. But most people who saw it saw it projected as a 35mm print, and there were all kinds of problems in getting it on to 35mm – for instance, it had to project at a different speed from the speed I shot it. And it had to have Dolby sound on it. So at a certain point you have to ask: is the cart pulling the horse or the horse pulling the cart?

The Camera, Your Connection

By the late 1990s I had really welcomed the advent of digital equipment. I had tried it out and found it to be technically very interesting and good. I thought the new technology was something that would give a new vitality to the relationship between the director and the actors – to the whole film-making process – by radically reducing the number of people who needed to be on the set. It also gave great physical freedom to the actors, because they no longer had to concentrate on hitting specific floor marks for the sake of focus – instead it was possible to follow them wherever they went and not worry about lighting, because one could shoot digital in very low light situations. On automatic, the cameras adapt very quickly, and – in my opinion, perfectly satisfactorily – to a change in light conditions.

One of the problems in film-making, though, is that there is a certain snobbery about pieces of equipment. In the old days, when movie cameras were big and bulky and covered with strange knobs, there was a kind of automatic fear of the equipment – almost like being in the army – that would cause you to respect it in a certain way. That deference has gone now, and in a way I applaud its passing. But that said, what I’d like to reintroduce is the idea of a personal discipline towards the equipment.

These days a digital video camera might cost two or three hundred pounds and fit in the palm of your hand. The more accessible a camera seems – the smaller it is, the more plastic its component parts – the less respect it will be given. The standard reaction will be to treat it in a sloppy way. So I urge young film-makers to change their attitudes about cameras. Don’t have an attitude towards the equipment based on your preconception of its value. For the period of its working life, the camera will be the film-maker’s most crucial connection between the idea – the intention – and the result. That’s the connection you’re interested in. It’s really important that you treat an inexpensive camera with exactly the same respect as you would an Arriflex 35mm camera. If it breaks and you need to throw it away, fine. But while it’s functioning, it has to be treated with love and respect.

If that seriousness doesn’t exist, if there’s a disdainful or disrespectful attitude to the camera, then the result will not be as good. I would extend that philosophy all the way through the digital film-making process and for all the tools you use – the camera, the tape, the computer. These things are yours for the period of this creation, and they have all to be imbued with the correct significance and seriousness, as befits the film-making process. If they’re not, then it will show.

I’ll make an analogy with music. If you go to a concert and hear a really great violinist playing a Stradivarius, you’ll be witness to a magnificent sound and a great performance. Now that violinist could take a twenty-dollar Chinese violin made for schoolchildren, tune it and play it, and I guarantee a lot of people couldn’t tell the difference from the Stradivarius – because of the musician. Similarly, a great drummer can pick up a wooden packing case and make it sound like an amazing set of drums. A photographer – let’s say a Cartier-Bresson – could pick up a Kodak Brownie and without a doubt he’d take great photographs. The point is that it doesn’t really matter what the equipment is. It really matters who the artist is, and what their attitude is. So a serious film-maker will pick up an Arriflex, 16mm or 35mm, or a Panasonic video camera, and you will see immediately that there is a serious intention in the way they’re holding the camera and the way they’re recording the image. It will not be ambiguous. It will not be negotiable. It will not be in doubt. They will state their relationship to the camera, like the musician...