American Cinematographer - August 2020 - 62

Collected Wisdom

t Steven Poster, ASC, who supervised second-unit cinematography on Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, interviewed director Steven Spielberg about their collaboration for the Feb.
1978 issue of AC. The production earned an Academy Award for director of photography
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, HSC, who commented on his own work on the movie in the Jan. 1978
issue. p The 1984 box-office hit Ghostbusters teamed ASC great Laszlo Kovacs with director
Ivan Reitman, who asked Kovacs to shoot the comedy more like a drama to lend onscreen
credibility to the story's outrageous supernatural elements.

inal stars of NBC's Saturday Night
Live, Aykroyd's film career includes
1941, The Blues Brothers and Trading
Places. Aykroyd reportedly wrote a
first draft screenplay and showed it to
longtime friend and fellow Saturday
Night Live alumnus, Bill Murray.
Murray and Aykroyd, in turn took the
idea to director Ivan Reitman, who
was instrumental in shifting the
emphasis from pure fantasy to wilder
comedy.
Director of photography Laszlo
Kovacs, ASC [HSC] was chosen to
photograph the picture. Kovacs' credits include Easy Rider; The King of
Marvin
Gardens;
Paper
Moon;
Nickelodeon; New York, New York; and,
more recently, Frances and Crackers.
Kovacs describes his involvement with the film: "I had never done
anything like this before. That's why I
was very excited when Ivan asked me
to do this film. It was such a challenge
because there were so many different
facets to it, the magnitude of the
visual effects, [shooting in] the 65mm
format, and so forth.
"We had a pretty close communication between Ivan, Richard
Edlund, ASC - supervisor of special
August 2020

effects - some of his matte painters
and artists, and myself. We had actual
sketches available to all of us to give
us a very strong idea of what to
expect and create. Everybody has to
have an idea of what is going on in
the scenes, especially the gaffer.
Certain things had to be pre-planned
and set up, lighting-wise. Without the
storyboards, we couldn't have done
that because, for certain things, you
can't wait until the day of production.
A lot of things have to be prepared
before then. For example, I used the
largest arcs ever built in Hollywood.
They built 16 of them, and I used 14! I
had specially built shutters for these
arcs, because we needed to simulate a
lightning effect. So every shot had to
be very carefully designed."
Photographing
Ghostbusters
indeed presented its own set of problems. The situations which arise in the
film, and which are humorous to the
viewer, are taken very seriously by
the characters. Therefore, the filming
was done as if the film were a drama,
and not a comedy. "I can be grateful
to Ivan," says Kovacs, "because the
first thing he told me - and I love
him for that! - was that he didn't
American Cinematographer - 100 Years

want this film to look like a comedy.
He wanted it to look just like a
dramatic piece. Afterwards, I thought
about it and realized it was really a
great approach. It really made
tremendous sense.
"Automatically,
everybody
shoots comedy in the traditional
approach. Very high-key photography, bright, cheerful, and all that. I've
done other comedies before and, for
various reasons, I always followed the
old, traditional way of lighting
comedy film. But, when you think of
it, comedy is really a piece of drama.
It's in fact, harder to do than a drama.
Especially a film with this subject
matter - ghosts getting loose in New
York, which is kind of a silly idea. So,
if you don't treat it seriously visually,
as you would a drama, it's not going
to have any credibility."
***
February 1988
From "School Daze - Black
College Is Background,"
by Linda Lynton
There have been plenty of films
made about college life over the years,

American Cinematographer - August 2020

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