American Cinematographer - January 2010 - 75

it is to conceptualize the way you’re going to shoot a film,” Deschanel continues. “Think about All The President’s Men. It’s about the minutiae that build and can bring down an entire government, and the whole visual approach contrasts the small with the large, focusing on the finest details and then widening out to a broader perspective. If you conceptualize something like that and stick to it, the audience may never realize what you have in mind specifically, but your choices can still communicate it to them on some subconscious level.” Willis remarks, “As a cinematographer, I’ve tried to do what I thought was appropriate for a given story, and I think Caleb has always shared that perspective. If I’ve helped, in some small way, to focus his thinking over the years, I couldn’t be happier. He understands the elegance of simplicity, and I think his visual choices have been superb.” After shooting more short films and documentaries, Deschanel wrote, directed and shot Trains, a short film that won the Silver Bear at the 1976 Berlin Film Festival. The next year, Ballard, a neighbor and collaborator on some documentary films, brought him aboard The Black Stallion, Ballard’s first feature. The production was filmed in Sardinia and Canada. “Back then, the Toronto crew was used to TV productions and that fast mode of working — they were used to directors who’d shoot from a list of shots,” says Deschanel. “Carroll hated call sheets. He wanted to be able to change his mind and shoot what he felt like shooting. I’d say, ‘Guys, Carroll is a really wonderful filmmaker,’ but they didn’t believe it.” Ballard credits Deschanel for his perseverance and ingenuity throughout the shoot. “Caleb has a tremendous eye, and he can invent things right on the spot,” he says. “For example, there was a scene where the boy [Kelly Reno] is supposed to get on the horse that’s standing in the water, and we just couldn’t get the horse in the water. We decided to shoot the scene from under- Deschanel offers his daughters, Zooey (at camera) and Emily, a glimpse of life on the set during filming of The Slugger’s Wife. water, where you could just see hooves and feet, so we could use a different horse. Neither of us had ever done any underwater photography, but Caleb got this very old housing for the Éclair and just did it with the most rudimentary equipment imaginable. Really, some of the neatest shots in the movie are things I didn’t even know he was shooting.” Ballard recalls a particularly rough day when he was sure the entire project had become a mistake. “I was just wiped out, and I was sure the film was a catastrophe,” says the director. “Caleb and I were walking together, trying to get back to the car, and we came across this river that just seemed to appear out of nowhere. We had to get across the river to get to where we were going, and Caleb said, ‘Come on. Get on my back and I’ll carry you across.’ I’ll never forget it. He was kind of like that the whole way through the film.” www.theasc.com Once completed, The Black Stallion sat on the shelf for two years. “The suits at United Artists said it was unreleasable,” Ballard recalls. “They said, ‘What is this, some kind of art film for kids?’” It wasn’t until 1979, when Ballard’s friend Francis Ford Coppola threw his support behind the film, that it reached theaters — and achieved critical acclaim and box-office success. Deschanel was offered his second feature by George Lucas, one of his classmates at USC. Lucas was producing More American Graffiti (1979), a sequel to his phenomenally successful American Graffiti, and he and director Bill Norton wanted visuals that were somewhat experimental: 16mm newsreel, anamorphic 35mm, standard 35mm and multiple-screen psychedelic imagery. (The film’s alternate title is Purple Haze.) “The 16mm material really showed me what a great medium film is,” Deschanel notes. “We January 2010 75

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American Cinematographer - January 2010

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