American Cinematographer - October 2014 - 50

Persistence of Vision
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Woody Allen

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Allen wrangles a rogue lobster in Annie Hall. The director persuaded Willis to include a small
panning move in the sequence, but he says the cinematographer - a notorious perfectionist
- later regretted caving in to Allen's suggestion. "He couldn't live with it," Allen recalls with a
fond chuckle. "Two months into the picture, he'd say to me, 'If we get a chance, let's go back
and make that shot again.'"

was going to make Annie Hall in
New York, and I was looking for a
New York cameraman. We wanted to
get a good one, and [executive
producer] Robert Greenhut said to me,
'I think Gordon Willis is available.' I
said, 'Fine, I've seen a couple of his
movies, and he's a wonderful cameraman.' So Gordy came over to my
house, and we talked, and we hit it off
immediately.
After that we worked together
for 10 years. I really learned filmmaking from him. If you look at my films
before Annie Hall, I didn't know what I
was doing! I was getting by strictly
because they were funny, and I was
piling one funny joke after another
without much devotion to how they

October 2014

were shot. But when Gordon came
along, he really showed me, by brute
force, the way to do it. He showed me
what was good, what was bad, what I
should be looking out for, what I should
avoid. And because he had such a
strong personality and such a great
résumé, I was only too eager to learn
from him.
Gordy would come over to my
house, and we would sit down in the
living room and go over the picture
scene by scene, deciding how we
wanted to shoot each scene and what
the basic, clear approach was going to
be on the picture - what the basic shot
structure was, whether we were going
to use handheld or long lenses. Gordy
was very fond of shooting everything

American Cinematographer

he humanly, possibly could with a
40mm lens. That was just fine, because
it was a very good lens for comedy.
I remember the first shot that I
made with him was in Annie Hall with
the lobsters. The lobsters dropped on
the floor, and we panned slightly from
one lobster to another. And he said,
'No, we should cut.' It was the first
time we'd ever worked together, and I
said, 'No, no, it's more exciting to pan
over with a sort of handheld look.' He
gave in to me on that, and he couldn't
sleep nights for the rest of the picture!
I mean, it bothered him so much -
this minor, minor intrusion on this set
of rigid rules that he had about his
aesthetic. He was never comfortable
with it. If you watch the picture, you
see this little pan for a second; there's
not a single human on the planet who
ever raised any question about it, nor
would anyone. It looks perfectly fine,
but not to his superb eye. To him, it
should have been a cut, even though it
was [a move of ] probably a foot from
right to left. And he couldn't live with
it. Two months into the picture, he'd
say to me, 'If we get a chance, let's go
back and make that shot again.' We
couldn't make it again; it was [just]
impossible to make it again. But that's
how much it bothered him!
The off-camera stuff in the interiors was something we eagerly plotted
together. And he showed me that on
the exterior scenes, I could have the
camera a mile away from people, and
they could be talking as they were
walking up the block for a long period
of time, and then when they finally got
close [to the camera], we would start
moving. At first, I didn't have the
confidence that the dialogue was going
to score or make an impression when
[the actors] were these tiny little figures
so far away from the camera. But he
said, 'Don't worry about it; it'll be fine.'
I took his word for it, because I felt that

Annie Hall photo courtesy of Brian Hamill.

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American Cinematographer - October 2014

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