American Cinematographer - October 2014 - 52

Persistence of Vision
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Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh (shown on the set of his Cinemax television series The Knick) played a
pivotal role in persuading Warner Bros. to release a DVD of End of the Road (1970), the first
feature shot by Willis.

n my early teens, when I was starting
to watch movies for reasons other
than pure entertainment, [Gordon
Willis] was probably the first cinematographer I recognized by name as
being a central piece of some of the
movies I thought were fantastic. He was
kind of my entry point into thinking
about cinematography as both an art
and a craft.
He was very articulate and very
open. The two interviews [by Howard
Schwartz, ASC] that were published in
September and October of 1978 in
American Cinematographer were fantastic - they're very detailed and they
have a great micro/macro balance,
where he'll talk about philosophy but
also about specific scenes.
In early 2001, Rick Lyman, when
he was working for the New York Times,
did this ["Watching Movies With"]
series, where he would have a filmmaker
screen a film, they would talk it
through, and he'd do a 2,500-word
piece on their conversation. I picked All

October 2014

the President's Men, and I spent almost
all of my time talking about Gordon's
work. Unexpectedly, a couple of
months later, I got a letter from [Willis]
and a signed DVD of the Godfather box
set and All the President's Men. The note
just said, 'Thank you so much for the
kind words.' It was very, very sweet, and
I wrote him back to say thanks, and
then reached out again when we were
doing the End of the Road documentary.
Warner Bros., I think, had literally picked End of the Road up at a
garage sale, and was kind of sitting on
it. So I approached them and said,
'Look, if I create a new piece of material to go along with the DVD, will you
guys remaster this and put it out? It's a
pretty significant cultural artifact of that
period, [and] it's the first feature shot by
Gordon Willis.'
I hadn't seen the film until
Warners sent me a sort of one-light
transfer, and I could even tell in that
rough form that it's all there - [Willis]
emerges full blown right out of the gate.

American Cinematographer

*|*
It's stunning. And at the very least, it's
the kind of intelligent provocation that
marked that era of filmmaking. It's a
movie that I think anybody who takes
movies seriously should be having a
look at.
[For the documentary that
accompanied the DVD release,] I got to
talk to Gordon, which was a lot of fun.
He was a very good storyteller. It was
interesting to hear Gordon talk about
how he and [director] Aram Avakian
related to each other. Aram, even
though it was his first feature, had had a
lot of life experience, but he gave
Gordon a lot of freedom and a lot of
responsibility, and it really paid off.
There weren't a lot of specifics, but
[Avakian] made it clear that he wanted
the interpretive level to be very high,
and I thought that was a very interesting turn of phrase - and one that
Gordon would know exactly how to
translate into working images.
Through his experience as a cinematographer when he was making
commercials, he became very fluent in
the visual grammar of linking chronological imagery. Gordon would enter
into discussions with the director about
blocking, how many shots, how they
were going to link, what shot goes from
where to where, and there's obviously a
common language to almost all the
films that he shot. You can see that
there's a design to how the shots go
together.
He was, to my mind, the first
American cinematographer to really
embrace the idea of competing color
temperatures within a frame. It was
shocking to hear that he didn't own a
color meter, and that he would do all of
that by eye! He really pioneered the idea
of setting a certain color temperature as
a base and letting everything go.
He also ended a practice that I
think we all used to look at and be
somewhat unsettled by: You'd have a lit

Photo by Mary Cybulski, courtesy of Cinemax.

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American Cinematographer - October 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2014