American Cinematographer - September 2008 - 55

Miller, Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Long Goodbye, Blow Out, The River, The Witches of Eastwick and The Black Dahlia. His many awards and nominations include an Oscar for Close Encounters, a BAFTA Award for The Deer Hunter, and an ASC Award for the telefilm Stalin. He earned the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999 and the Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. No Subtitles Necessary retraces the lives and careers of these two legends through interviews with the principals, film clips, and a wealth of commentary by an array of industry figures, including Karen Black, Sandra Bullock, Graeme Clifford, Richard Donner, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Tatum O’Neal, Bob Rafelson, Barbra Streisand, Sharon Stone, Jon Voight, John Williams and Irwin Winkler. Chressanthis also interviews several directors of photography, including ASC members Allen Daviau, Ellen Kuras, Stephen Poster, Owen Roizman, Vittorio Storaro and Haskell Wexler. Additional critical perspective is provided by film critics Leonard Maltin and Todd McCarthy and ASC publicist Bob Fisher. Speaking with AC in Cannes, Chressanthis describes himself as a cinematographer who has been “looking through a camera since I was 10.” He trained as an engineer and fine artist before progressing to documentary work; later, he enrolled in the cinematography program at the American Film Institute, where he met Kovacs during a workshop. Howard Schwartz, ASC introduced Chressanthis to Zsigmond, and he subsequently served as an intern on Zsigmond’s camera crew during production of The Witches of Eastwick. In the years since, Chressanthis has amassed his own body of work as a cinematographer, including the Emmy-nomi- nated biopics Four Minutes and Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. From the start, Chressanthis envisioned No Subtitles Necessary as a film outside the standard documentary genre. “Many documentaries, even very good ones, end up falling into the trap of being expositional — a school lesson,” he observes. Describing Kovacs and Zsigmond as “complex individuals,” he adds, “I didn’t think of this film as a documentary, but as a non-fiction dramatic film.” This philosophy led him to apply more dramatic lighting than is customary for a documentary, as well as dolly moves during interviews whenever possible. Chressanthis chose Anka Malatynska to be the project’s director of photography. In an e-mail from Thailand, she writes, “Working on the documentary was a deeply humbling experience. It was an honor to hear the stories of two masters. Every day, I learned something new about cinematography and the Hollywood school of hard knocks.” Six other cinematographers — Tarina Reed, Zoltan Honti, Christopher Johnson, Ed Gutentag, Melissa Holt and Chressanthis — lent their skills to the project as well. (The director also cites the significant contributions of producers Tony Frere, Zachary Kranzler and Kian Soleimanpour; editor and co-producer Elisa Bonora; associate producer Ashley Welles Lewis; and executive producers David Kaminsky, M.D., and Jimmy Conroy II.) The images in No Subtitles Necessary were captured primarily on Super 16mm and high-definition (HD) video, but the film is peppered with snippets of MiniDV and some Super 8mm (shot by Kranzler). Most of the picture was shot with Aaton XTR Prod and Arriflex 16SR-3 and 416 cameras on Kodak Vision2 250D 7205 and 200T 7217 and Vision3 500T 7219. Long interviews were shot with the Panavision Genesis, and some “off-the-cuff” footage was shot with a Panasonic AG-HVX200. Front-end lab work was done at LaserPacific with telecine onto HDCam SR in 1080p as opposed to 2K — a process Chressanthis refers to as “the poor man’s DI.” The film was shot in 50 days over 14 months, during which Chressanthis conducted roughly 70 interviews. The variety of lighting styles in the film is the result of a deliberate decision to adapt the form to the subjects and settings. For example, prior to the interview with Roizman, Malatynska recalls that Chressanthis asked her to light the set as “an homage” to Roizman’s highcontrast work on The Exorcist. In a smoke-filled studio at Mole Opposite page: After escaping from Sovietcontrolled Hungary during the 1956 insurrection, Laszlo Kovacs (left) and Vilmos Zsigmond became lifelong friends and prominent ASC members. This page, above: James Chressanthis, ASC has demonstrated his respect for the duo by directing and producing a documentary about their lives. Below: The film’s cinematographer, Anka Malatynska, found the production “a deeply humbling experience.” Photos courtesy of Majar Productions. American Cinematographer 55

American Cinematographer - September 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2008