American Cinematographer - April 2016 - 66

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Rebel With a Camera

Director John Sayles with Wexler on location for The Secret of Roan Inish.

Bailey: If they ever made a movie
out of Jack Abbott's In the Belly of the
Beast - for the title alone, Haskell
Wexler should have been the directorcinematographer. Haskell never shied
away from controversy, political or cinematic; in fact, he relished it, much to the
dismay of some colleagues who butted
heads with him. There aren't many
cinematographers, after all, who have
been placed on the FBI's 'watch list'
because of their political activism.
Yates: Haskell believed his documentary film Underground, about the
radical Weather Underground fugitives,
cost him his job as the cinematographer
of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when
the FBI called the set to investigate
him. And when he requested his FBI
file via the Freedom of Information Act,
it came to him heavily redacted. One
page was entirely blacked out except for
his name.
Ron Shelton (director of Blaze):
I'm sure everybody you interview will
say he was cranky and cantankerous. I
can't imagine anybody wouldn't say that.
But that didn't prevent us from having a
good time working together.
I would get into it with him. I
66

April 2016

would say, 'I'm sure you didn't take this
long to shoot Medium Cool,' which
wasn't really fair since Blaze was a
different kind of movie. We'd get after
each other like that, but when the scene
was lit, it was gorgeous! He definitely
wasn't a yes-man, but I was certainly
very happy with the results.
John Sayles (director of
Matewan, The Secret of Roan Inish,
Limbo and Silver City): I worked with
him four times - I think I hold the
record. The first time was Matewan. It
was a very ambitious movie, like all the
ones we made with Haskell. A big
period piece about miners. We had very
little money and time, [but] his speedto-talent ratio was great. When you're
in a hurry - as you always are on an
under-budgeted, ambitious movie -
you need a cinematographer to do his
best with the time he's got, and with
Haskell it was often, 'Oh! We're done
lighting? Let's go!'
There's this sequence at the
beginning of the movie where the
miners walk out of the mine and go on
strike. It's probably 14 shots. We had to
go to locations throughout three different counties to find the old workers'
housing and other details - we couldn't
American Cinematographer

really build those things. We shot the
scene over eight days, quarter pages at a
time, and Haskell, when we did the
scout, said, 'If you want this to hang
together, you need to do this shot at 3
o'clock and this shot at 10 o'clock.' So
we scheduled it [that way], and when
we put it all together it worked perfectly.
I've worked with a bunch of great
cinematographers early in their careers,
and I think a lot get to the point of, 'Do
I really want to go back and have a third
of the equipment package and half the
time I'll have on these bigger pictures?'
But Haskell continued to make documentaries throughout his life where
you're doing catch-as-catch-can lighting. And his own features he directed,
he didn't have much money. He kept his
hand in run-and-gun filmmaking. I
remember that on set, he would say,
'There are no problems, only opportunities.'
Taggart: Haskell was lively and
very funny. His humor came out of the
moment. He was also very generous.
People would call and just want to talk,
and he would talk to them. If he saw
somebody's work that he thought was
fantastic, he'd call and tell him.
Bobby Bukowski: I had been at a
screening at the Clubhouse, and I naturally had my phone off. When I walked
outside and picked up my messages,
there was a voicemail saying, 'This is
Haskell Wexler and I want to talk to
you.' I called him back and he said, 'I
saw two of your movies this year.' Those
would have been Time Out of Mind and
99 Homes. He said, 'I just want to say I
like what you were doing and I'd like to
know how you did it. Why don't we
have lunch together?' I was [going to
be] away and couldn't make an appointment for lunch until I got back. When
I returned to L.A. - literally the week
that he died - I thought, 'Okay, this is
a good week to have lunch with
Haskell.' Unfortunately, I got the news
of his passing.
I must say that it was very
moving and inspiring for me to hear
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2016
