American Cinematographer - February 2017 - 81

Possum Living photo by Lisa Rinzler.

Above: Dolly Freed steps in front of the camera for the documentary Possum Living, which
Schreiber both shot and directed. Right: The cinematographer at work in Louisiana.

needed a lot of light. The camera was
physically hot, and it had a cord several
inches thick running out to the trailer,
where the Japanese engineers would be."
Co-directors Stuart Samuels and Todd
McCarthy were thrilled to conduct indepth interviews, thanks to the camera's
ability to run uninterrupted for an hour,
but Schreiber just remembers the baking
heat. "The interviews were extensive and
I was fascinated listening to my idols, but
I had a hard time not keeling over from
the heat," she relates. But on this and her
next NHK HD project, Route 66 -
which employed the same camera - she
applied lessons learned from earlier
Betacam work. Using low light, long
lenses and wide apertures, "I tried to trick
the camera to be more filmic, and to not
look like video," she explains. "This did
not make the engineers too happy, and
they kept saying, 'More light!'"
The work accelerated. "I knew
how to light and shoot people, so I kept
getting hired for that - in particular, [to
shoot] women." She adds, "Kevin Bacon
found and hired me to light his wife,
Kyra [Sedgwick], when he directed
Loverboy." On the Emmy-nominated
The Celluloid Closet, she crossed paths
again with Shirley MacLaine. First thing
the actress said was, "Nancy, I know
you'll keep that camera high and the key
light low, right?" Similarly, Schreiber

recalls Meg Ryan in Cheryl Hines'
Serious Moonlight: "She was sitting on a
couch with a mirror looking at the lighting! These leading ladies know how to
light themselves. I'd always try to make it
right before they came to set, so they
would never complain."
In the 1990s Schreiber began
getting dramatic-feature work. Among
her personal favorites from that decade:
Chain of Desire, a La Ronde-type indie
that netted her an Independent Spirit
Awards nomination; the jazz movie Lush
Life, which starred Jeff Goldblum and
Forest Whitaker and was loaded with
musical numbers by Lennie Niehaus;
Neil LaBute's sophomore outing Your
Friends & Neighbors; and Ann Hu's
period drama Shadow Magic, which took
Schreiber back to China.
The 1990s also brought her back
to Detroit for her first shoot there: an
MTV video of Aretha Franklin. Her
mother came to watch her work for the
first time, and remarked, "'There sure are
a lot of men.' She had absolutely no idea
what I did," Schreiber recalls with a
laugh. "All she knew was there was a lot
of travel, it was very unstable, and she
sure wished I'd get a 'real' job."
Two years later, in 1995, Society
members John Alonzo, Adam Holender
and Steven Poster successfully recommended Schreiber for ASC memberwww.theasc.com

ship. "I remember showing work and
being interviewed and being incredibly
nervous. I was worried about getting in
with my 'little indie movies.'"
It was in fact a little indie
movie, shot on MiniDV no less, that
won Schreiber a Sundance Film Festival
Cinematography Award - Greg
Harrison's November (AC May '04),
produced by InDigEnt, an early champion of digital cinema. "InDigEnt had
a great model of small digital movies
with great actors," Schreiber notes.
"Crewmembers received the same rate,
$100 per day, but we saw back-end -
and I still get small deferral checks to this
day." This was actually Schreiber's second
Sundance award, the first of which she
shared for the documentary My
America... or Honk If You Love Buddha.
November, starring Courteney
Cox, was Schreiber's first experience with
Panasonic's
AG-DVX100,
the
company's then-new 24p camcorder.
"The camera was so inexpensive that we
could take it scouting and test on the
spot," the cinematographer says. Seeing
the movie projected on the giant Eccles
screen at Sundance, however, made her
cringe, though she opines that it ultimately didn't matter. "I got the award,"
she says, "but I'll never forget how horrible early digital projection was. It is
funny to think that I chose to bake in the
February 2017

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2017
