American Cinematographer - July 2020 - 30

Storaro and His Directors

pp The attack on Do Lung Bridge in Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and shot by Storaro.
p In a famous cameo, Coppola and Storaro turn up onscreen as members of a TV news crew.

China. You have to study Chinese art,
breathe Chinese air, eat Chinese food
- make real experiences in China.' I
said, 'I need to see the monuments,
the painting, the architecture to materialize these concepts - but the structure is universal.' It could just as
easily apply to the king in Madrid, or
wherever. If one analyzes it, this is the
same structure.
"Bernardo loved the diaries of
Pu Yi because he was practically iden-

tifying with him. He made that story
his own story - that is what made
the movie so strong. It was very
symbolic when, in The Last Emperor,
the father of the emperor bows to the
little-boy emperor - that is what
Bernardo wanted to achieve. From
the beginning, when I read the diaries
I understood right away what he had
in mind. He liked my idea because I
superimposed an idea on top that
helped to visualize his story." The

From Apocalypse Now and the Last Emperor to The Conformist, Storaro has
always been a poet when it comes to painting celluloid with color. I've long
admired his attention to detail with regard to the subtext and the inner emotion of
the character, and how to translate that visually. It is so important that we as cinematographers think about those things, as it is actually character and emotion
more than any plot that will transport the audience into a new world.
- Rachel Morrison, ASC
30

July 2020

American Cinematographer - 100 Years

film won all nine Academy Awards
for which it was nominated, including Best Director for Bertolucci and
Best Cinematography for Storaro.
The last two films they made
together were The Sheltering Sky
(1990) and Little Buddha (1993). "After
Little Buddha, Bernardo invited me to
dinner, and he said, 'I don't know
why, but the next movie I want to do
without you.' I was shocked. I didn't
know why. The Little Buddha shooting
had gone very well - I felt very bad.
I didn't understand the reason.
"Bernardo was not able to tell
me why we stopped - I feel he somehow needed to prove to himself that it
wasn't necessary to be tied to Vittorio,
but I don't know...
"I never left him. I still did
restorations of the films, because they
are part of my whole life. When
Cinecittà, in 1995, asked me to restore
all the films I did with Bernardo for
the Cannes Film Festival, I said yes -
and again in 2010 when they did the
festival at MOMA in New York. I
cannot give them up to someone else.
You have to take care of your work,
protect it."
Now, Storaro has begun an
ambitious project to restore all 10
films he made with Bertolucci for an
archive that is being established in the
director's hometown of Parma. The
restoration is in process at the
Cineteca di Bologna. Storaro has
chosen to store the restored versions
on a metal-alloy tape called DOTS -
or Digital Optical Technology System
- that stores data visually, and is
chemically inert, non-magnetic, and
immune from electromagnetic fields.
A digital equivalent of black-andwhite separations, DOTS was developed by Eastman Kodak and is now
owned by Group 47. The medium,
which can be stored at temperatures
ranging from 15° to 150° Fahrenheit,
is stated to last at least 100 years,
though some estimates bring it to
2,000 years. The Conformist has
already been completed and The Last
Emperor is next in line.

American Cinematographer - July 2020

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