American Cinematographer - March 1985 - 67

An Interview with John Alcott

by Mitch Tuchman

To stand

John Alcott and the

sweltering beside a
largely British crew on the West

camera crew

for

Baby.

African locations of Walt Disney's
Baby is to recall Noel Coward's
dictum that "mad dogs and Eng¬
lishmen go out in the midday
sun." It is a relief therefore that

John Alcott's photography is
brisk.
"I

always thought that to
took hours
John Taplin
explained in praising Alcott, his di¬
rector of photography on this film
as well as on his last, Under Fire.
have beautiful light
and hours," producer

"It

was a

kind of frustration that

to go through. John man¬
make it beautiful without
taking hours."

you

had

ages to

Saharan

southwesterly

dust

across

blows

the African

continent toward its Atlantic

shores. To a cinematographer like
Alcott with a predilection for nat¬
ural ambient illumination, this harmattan is a godsend. It diffuses the

scorching

rays

of the

sun,

reducing

the contrast between bright light
and shadow, reducing the time
otherwise spent addressing it.
But Africa is not all blaz¬

ing heat and blowing dust. The
jungle near Abidjan, capital of the
Ivory Coast, is so dense that it ob¬
scures

the

sun at noon

and all but

eclipses it by four. Alcott speaks
of this rain forest as "the interior."
What he forgoes there in the way
of artificial lighting, he more than
makes up for in pre-production

cunning.
Picture, as he did, a dusky
jungle clearing (where up to half of
Baby was shot), and bear in mind
his goal: a wide-screen adventure
(about an American couple who
find a family of living dinosaurs)
with the "glory of what's here" es¬
tablished in every long shot. For
that he needed

depth of field,

which

anamorphic lenses at low
light levels cannot provide. Al¬
cott's

solution (as it

was

on

the snowy,

Cameroon) is Super-Techniscope,

moonlit maze of The
Shining, that depth of field crucial

which

anamorphic print
photography. SuperTechniscope permits Alcott to use

to

his favorite Arriflex lenses with

completely credible

wide-open

apertures

denizen.

achieve,

he did in the candlelit
of Barry Lyndon and

Greystoke, shot earlier in nearby
based

yields

on

as

sequences

March 1985

an

flat

and still

to

the narrative. After all, when
the title character of your picture
is a baby brontosaurus, it must be

Alcott says,

important thing for

American

Cinematographer

as a

"The

jungle
most

me was

the

65



American Cinematographer - March 1985

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