American Cinematographer - January 2010 - 73

Photos by Ron Grover; Sidney Baldwin; Bruce Herman; Brian Hamill, SMPSP; Takashi Seida; Andrew Cooper, SMPSP; and Philippe Antonello. Opposite: Caleb Deschanel, ASC (right) consults with director Philip Kaufman during filming of The Right Stuff. This page, top: Kaufman and Deschanel flank legendary pilot Chuck Yeager on a break during the shoot. Bottom: Deschanel takes to a crane to capture a shot for the film. includes such memorable films as Being There (1979), The Right Stuff (1983), The Natural (1984), Fly Away Home (1996), The Patriot (2000), The Passion of the Christ (2004), National Treasure (2004) and Ask the Dust (2005), has indeed been impressive, and it’s still going strong. Next month he will accept the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award, the latest honor on a roster that includes an ASC Award (for The Patriot), two other ASC nominations (for The Passion of the Christ and Fly Away Home), and five Academy Award nominations (for The Passion of the Christ, The Patriot, Fly Away Home, The Natural and The Right Stuff ). A native of Philadelphia, Pa., Deschanel became interested in photography as a boy after receiving a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye as a gift. He took up the hobby in high school, shooting photos for the school newspaper and yearbook, but when he began considering colleges, he decided to pursue a career in medicine. He enrolled in Johns Hopkins University, thinking he would become a doctor, but his interest in the visual arts soon took hold, and he began studying art and photography. A meeting with New York-based photographer George Pickow led to an opportunity to work as his assistant during summer breaks from Hopkins. “I knew I wanted to be involved in photography, but at that point I hadn’t thought of it as a career,” says Deschanel. Working in the darkroom and watching Pickow shoot the eclectic assignments that were typical of a successful photographer’s shop in the mid-1960s helped push Deschanel closer to the idea of pursuing photography as a profession. “George did all kinds of stuff — catalogs, album covers, magazine covers,” recalls Deschanel. “He’d take six models and some wigs out for a couple of days and shoot a year’s covers for one of the www.theasc.com murder magazines that were popular at the time. He could use each model at least twice by changing her wig.” Deschanel spent his free time in New York’s revival houses, where he mainly watched foreign films; the French New Wave and Italian neo-realism made a strong impression. “Those films just felt more accessible to me than the big studio movies of that time, and I really liked the themes and stories,” he recalls. “They were much more naturalistic. There was a certain casualness to them, and it made me realize you could actually do a movie like that instead of Ben-Hur. The French filmmakers didn’t have the budget for 20 January 2010 73

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American Cinematographer - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2010