American Cinematographer - October 2014 - 47

All the President's Men photos from the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library, courtesy of Warner Bros.

Top: Key scenes for
All the President's
Men were shot
under fluorescent
lighting on a set that
replicated the
newsroom of The
Washington Post
down to the smallest
detail. Below, top to
bottom: The crew
sets up a dolly shot;
director Alan Pakula
confers with Willis;
actors Dustin
Hoffman and Robert
Redford star as
dogged Post
reporters Carl
Bernstein and Bob
Woodward.

took him to The Apple Pan, which had
one of the best burgers in L.A. We sat
at the counter and ate our burgers, and
he said, 'Hey, you're all right.'
We became very close friends
from that moment on. What I found
out about Gordy is that if you knew
what you were doing and you listened,
he had total respect for you. If you
didn't know what you were doing and
you were faking it, you didn't want to be
around him.
A week-and-a-half before we
started shooting Bad Company, we flew
to Kansas, where we were going to
make the film. Gordy told me and
Robert Benton, 'Okay, we are going to
go through the script and we are going
to know exactly how we want to make
this movie.' We went to page one and
Gordy said, 'So, Bob, how do you want
to open the movie? Do you want to be
wide, tight, moving, stationary?' And
Bob told him how he saw the opening
of the movie. Gordy said, 'Okay, the
transition from scene one to scene two
- do you see it going from dark to
light, light to dark, high to low, wide to
close, moving to stationary - how do
you want to see it?' And we did that for
every scene of the movie, spending two
or three hours every night for a week.
By the time we started shooting the
movie, we all knew how we wanted to
make it. Of course there was always
opportunity to change your mind, but

you had a plan. From a communication
standpoint, it was really easy working
with Gordy.
Robert
Redford
(actor/
producer on All the President's Men):
Gordon had a very strong vision and a
very strong point of view about cinematography, and he stayed true to it
even when it rubbed some people the
wrong way. He was a real visionary
with a very innovative approach, and it
had a lot to do with light and dark.
When we were outside on the
streets [at night], he would not light
the streets. He would wet the streets
and use the car lights on the wet pavement to reflect the light, and use that
as the lighting source. I thought that
was really, really interesting. Very bold.
We talked about Deep Throat
and [whether] you see him or not. The
idea was to emphasize the mystery.
You couldn't ever really see him
completely; he would be in shadow
and just partly visible. And then I
would be on the other side of that, also
in the dark but struggling to see.
I remember feeling like
[Gordon] had a real grip on how he
wanted to shoot All the President's
Men, and the way he wanted to shoot
it was totally in keeping with what I
thought the story should be. Inside
the newsroom, it was fluorescent
lighting and no shadows, and that's
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American Cinematographer - October 2014

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