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Summer on the Mountain An Interview with Cinematographer Robert Elswit By Bridgette Bates In the words of Sundance Institute's Executive Director Ken Brecher, "One can learn to love eating in a tent." Tent dining is a quintessential experience of the Sundance Labs where Lab Fellows and Creative Advisors gather in the mountains of Utah each summer for what participants have affectionately called summer camp for artists. During this past June, the Feature Film Program under the direction of Michelle Satter hosted the Directors Lab, which offers eight filmmakers the supportive environment to develop new work under the supervision of experts in the field. The Insider sat down in the dining tent with a rogue chipmunk and Academy-Award winning cinematographer Robert Elswit to talk about his role as a Creative Advisor in this landscape of fresh air and fresh perspective. Some of Elswit's most recent DP work includes: There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, Punch Drunk Love, Magnolia, and Boogie Nights. Insider: From a Creative Advisor's perspective what is like working with the filmmakers at the Directors Lab? RE: I love coming here because of all the things the Fellows deal with when they start working on a project. All the basic elements that they are coming to grips with in terms of narrative filmmaking and storytelling; it reconnects me with basic stuff. Yet at the same time because the projects are so unusual and so varied and the people that they pick to come up here are so bright, I learn more in the Advisors meetings and interacting on sets than I do in three or four years of going from movie to movie. It's really about listening to the other Mentors/Advisors and getting six to eight different takes on the same material, screenings, or the same script and hearing absolutely valid and sometimes completely contradictory views about stuff and everybody is (not to be terribly humble) much smarter and more experienced than I am. Insider: What's the difference between a conversation you would have with the filmmakers at the Labs and what you would have with a filmmaker on a set? RE: We hang back and just say, "Hey it might be better if you do it this way!" This may be completely contradictory to what a cinematographer would normally tell a director to do. I should talk to each Fellow individually about the difference between being a cinematographer and being a filmmaker and how being both is complicated. You don't always become a partner with a filmmaker which I think is a nice thing to be able to do. Sometimes you're just on the wrong movie. The idea is to work with someone whose taste you respect, someone who appreciates your input, and someone who you understand in a way that allows you to get the story told without compromising what it is you are trying to do. As a real filmmaker, you are there to serve the story and the director and it doesn't mean rolling over in stupid ways. But if you have a basic respect and it's worthwhile that allows you to give stuff up. Often a great deal of time and money get eaten up by the people who do my job, and by me using too much time and money I am taking away from the director. If I spend three hours lighting something that's three hours less time the director has on set with the actors to make the movie. There has to be a clear understanding to scale your ideas of how the movie should look to the budget, the time, the energy, and the nature of whomever it is directing the film. Insider: During the talkback with the Lab Fellows which followed a screening of There Will Be Blood, you mentioned how much prep you had done beforehand. Is that prep a piece of advice you give to cinematographers? RE: You can't always get it because they [studios] won't pay for it. It's really advice for directors. Maybe it's the nature of the movie that there's nothing to be gained from rehearsal time, but if there are lots of locations, if there's a relatively short time to make the movie (which there always is), and if there's a certain amount of planning that has to be done with the art department, with me, with everybody, then the more time you have to prep the more time you will save in the middle of a production day. [In There Will Be Blood] Paul [Thomas Anderson] uses it in a very specific way to find a visual style to his movie. A lot of directors will do that in a limited extent, but Paul does that more than anyone else. He really wants to see what these costumes, what these roles, what this location looks like at this time of day and how this relates to a scene. He wants to reflect on which is time consuming and expensive. Most films can't afford it or most directors aren't interested in being as precise as him. Tony Gilmore [director of Michael Clayton] really makes use of prep. He is completely focused and knows if he doesn't figure things out now he'll regret it. We shot all kinds of sequences beforehand. We went to multiple locations over and over, and we planned as much as we could. Insider: What are your visual influences outside of film? RE: Early on I was a theatre major (a set design/lighting major) which in academic theatre is better taught than film school because it's more exacting and it's taught as a craft. In film school it's taught as magic. I've never seen a program where it makes any sense. The craft element in theatre is taught really well, so you end up with a history of pictorial style in a very specific way. There's a creature! [Chipmunk runs into the dining tent and hides under a nearby table.] My real job description is to light a set and the ideas all come from a 300-400 year period of painting during the Renaissance throughout 15th, 16th, 17th century in northern Europe. All ideas about how to create images that are expressive and use light as the metaphor for understanding a meaning of what the painting or image is all come from this one time period. The biggest influence on me was painting because of my background in theatre in lighting a stage or set. Insider: When you are lighting a set now do you think about lighting as metaphor? RE: I think lighting is the only metaphor that works in film. This is advanced secret knowledge! You have all these elements you deal with in organizing images: color, lines, volume, etc. all in 2-dimensional space. In representational art (in 2-dimensional images) it's about where the light is coming from, how light falls on the objects, and how it tells you what is going on. It's the one visual metaphor and going back to the ideas of this whole tradition, it tells you about the gaining of knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and transcendence. We light the set in a way that supposedly is a correlative for a state of a character, or the nature of the scene, or the mood. It's hopefully more than just the mood of what appears in the theatre, but it becomes a dialectic. There's a sense in movies that things are not standing still the way they are in the theatre. We are recreating a realistic space and trying to make something optically real even if it's not naturalistic. We're trying to create the illusion that time is advancing: it's early morning, late afternoon, midnight. This infuses the story with some kind of meaning. There's a great moment in Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys that I remember reading about and disagreed with. He shot a number of scenes on bridges (it was shot in Pittsburgh with all these bridges across the river.) He said the bridges were metaphors for the connections between the various groups of people in the movie... the bridges between the generations and between the academic and real world. It was this marvelous explanation of how bridges functioned. Quite honestly, they're just bridges! Things function so concretely in movies that objects can very rarely symbolize anything. Never are they metaphors. A bridge is a bridge. These are literary tropes; ideas that come from writing and novels. Movie ideas are light. It may be a selfish way for me to look at it, but I have a secret power that I can change the nature of this film by how I light it. That's why it's so easy to fuck up someone's movie. .

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