American Cinematographer - October 2014 - 75

movie was originally the story of a New
York cop who masquerades as a potential
psychopathic killer, in order to infiltrate a
political assassination ring. As we filmed,
the hero was being rewritten into an
investigative reporter for a San Diego
daily. This during a writer's strike.
Warren Beatty starred. He had a pay-orplay deal, and wouldn't agree to a delay in
shooting. So Beatty and the director,
Alan Pakula, spent hours every day fussing with the script before they filmed.
I'd been working in documentaries, where I'd wade through reams of
footage, piecing together the story.
Gordon did exactly the opposite. As he
put it, he saw the story in his head: every
image, as it played in the picture,
slammed together. He was building a
solid visual structure. He never zoomed
his lens; changing focal length shifted
perspective in a way that destroyed the
picture space. When an actor sat down
in a scene, the camera couldn't just pan
down with him. The whole camera had
to arm down - in effect, sit with him.
When Gordon panned or tilted, the
movement had to be so naturally a part
of the visual story that it was invisible.
Pakula had told his cinematographer that he wanted a comic-book look,
which Gordon interpreted as composed,
flat and frontal, with bold blocks of carefully calibrated color. Mainly, Gordon
struggled with the fact that Parallax was
a "damn jump-cut picture." Since they
didn't have a script yet, the picture he was
shooting, he knew, would be cuisinarted
into a whole new story. This betrayed his
visceral need to shape the visual whole.
He cursed when we shot entrances and
exits to establish a scene: these were "just
damn shoe leather" that would slow
down the picture and confuse things. He
swore that it would all end up on the
floor. Inevitably, he said, the movie
would jump from the middle of one
scene to the middle of another.
So that was how he held it all
together. He photographed his close-up
shots from exactly the same distance,
scene after scene in the picture, and used
exactly the same focal-length lens. That
way, Pakula could jump from scene to

scene by going from one close-up to
another, and the picture would still feel
solidly constructed.
***
People said that Willis was slow,
but he wasn't. He was just exceptionally
precise. He lit simply, with few lights,
often just an overhead diffusing
"chicken coop" that he'd devised, which
cast a downward glow on the actors. He
lit the scene at the bottom limit of the
film's sensitivity. Then he coaxed out
shadow detail with dim fill lights.
Rembrandt was a model, and Georges
de La Tour.
This style had an added advantage. No one could screw with it. There
was no latitude, as they say. Gordon
despised latitude. Gordon told me this,
but I saw it for myself. After shooting, I
stayed on with Pakula, and one of my
jobs was supervising the final color
correction of The Parallax View's answer
print. That was the highest quality
available then, or perhaps ever:
Technicolor three-strip printing. The
three negative strands were stamp-like
matrices, dipped in dye and pressed on
the film. Changing the shade of a single
scene required remaking an entire thousand-foot reel. With The Parallax View,
if the lab pumped in the slightest extra
light when they printed a shot, the
whole image went muddy gray. You had
to print it just like Gordon saw it in his
head. Nowadays a cinematographer can
go and tweak the light on a person's
cheekbone, but back then you were
stuck with the whole frame. And, in
Gordon's case, stuck with a single way
of printing it.
The Parallax View was not an
actor's picture, and Beatty had a realistic
sense of his own performance. There
was only one scene of which he seemed
genuinely proud: When, trying to pass
for a psychopath in his interview with
an assassin recruiter, he subtly breaks
down and has a faint psychotic episode
to convince the man he's right for the
job. It was complicated (this being
Pakula), because Beatty's crusading
journalist actually has the very personality trait that he's pretending to have.
75
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American Cinematographer - October 2014

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