American Cinematographer - March 1984 - 53

'ooks

to someone

who lives and works there.

"Sometimes," the direc¬
tor

says,

"Don will tell

where I'd indicated

a

me

that

3 5, a 24 or a

30 is better. It's a constant giveand-take: 1 make a suggestion; he
comes back with another; we both
look through the camera and de¬
cide. Same thing with coverage,
both before and after blocking out
the scene with the actors."
The aforementioned Jeff

Bridges-Rachel Ward scene, for
example, had been Steadicamed
out in advance of shooting. But
Thorin and Hackford made

an on-

the-spot decision

to augment Dan
Lerner's work with a few fixed-an¬

gle Panaflex shots

at

action. It was a
actors' energies

question of the

the end of the

being exhausted

the end of a grueling day and
the relative ease of getting what
Hackford wanted from them with
near

a

stationary shot.
In his short

career

as

a

feature director, Hackford has
shown a remarkable ability with

Ray Sharkey got great
notices for The Idolmaker, and for

actors:

Officer, Lou Gossett, Jr., won the
Best Supporting Actor Oscar, De¬
bra Winger a Best Actress nomina¬
tion, and Richard Gere praise for
his unmannered freshness. Gere
and Winger's unusually natural,
"hard" R-rated love scenes did
much to make their relationship

believable, and Hackford hopes

Thorin sets

that the steamy scenes between
the principals in Against All Odds
will function in the same way. Get¬

on

a

shot

location.

ting this erotic material on film ef¬
fectively requires, in addition to a
gifted director, a cameraman with
skills that go beyond lighting and
lenses and composition.
"It's a very sensitive
area," Thorin comments, "and I
think the key to it is for the actors
to feel confident that you're inter¬
ested not only in making a goodlooking film but in their perform¬
ances, too. Once they feel that,
your problems and their problems
become one and the same, and it's
simply a matter of working to¬
gether to solve them. It helps, of
course, to shoot that kind of ma¬
terial well into the picture, so that
a trusting relationship has already

developed."
Against All Odds star
James Woods talks about the ac¬
tor-cameraman relationship from
his end: "Some cameramen will
read the scene and just light for
what they've read or what the di¬
rector asks for. But Don will offer
artistic input of his own apropos
of the mood of a scene, given what
the actor's doing. He'll watch the

give it more of an edge.' He will
incorporate the performance into
his decisions, so you feel as if you
are covered. That spirit of cooper¬
ation is highly infectious. - I'll try
to help him. The other day I was
up against a white wall in a dark
or

and he asked me, 'Can you
try to get away from the wall be¬
cause it's really hard not to get
light spilling onto it, even if we use
room

rehearsal, and

a

doing

movement.

here,

say, 'Well, Jimmy's
different kind of thing

a

so

I

want to

soften this

a

bit

flag?' I just readjusted

my

"The other thing,''
Woods continues, "is that when

you're out there with the camera
rolling, the director and the other
tuned into you

actors

are

course,

but it's kind of

if the

cameraman

a

of

bummer

is concerned

only with his light. Don's not like
that
he's a good audience. I'll
ask him what he thought of my
performance because I trust his
judgment and because I know" Woods echoes Taylor Hack¬
-

ford
"that he's interested in the
overall storytelling."
■
-

Woods and
in

a

shot

March 1984

low
on

Bridges

key interior

location.

American

Cinematographer

53
American Cinematographer - March 1984

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