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the flashing, you could lose an enormous amount of work. But somehow, it never happened! God always smiled on people flashing their negative.” Cinematographer Jan Kiesser, ASC, CSC, who served as Zsigmond’s operator on Blow Out, recalls that he used a combination of the Panaflex camera and a Panaflex X — a smaller, lighter body — on the film. Though the eyepiece on the X was fixed, Kiesser felt it had better optics. “I was better able to judge the focus with the X,” he says. “It was nice to have the Panaflex as a fallback for handheld work or if we required some eyepiece adjustment, but otherwise, I preferred working with the X.” Zsigmond and De Palma both liked Panavision’s 30mm anamorphic prime lens — a significantly wide-angle focal length for anamorphic work. “I shot a lot of Blow Out with that lens,” Zsigmond recalls. “I love that lens for shooting locations and real interiors, or even a set sometimes, because you can get everything into the shot. I love the distortion. I never want to just shoot a talking head, and Brian was always the same way. He liked the wide-angle lenses and the way they place you in the middle of the action. He always wants to do the kinds of things cinematographers love to do!” Along with their preference for packing more information into the frame (instead of relying more heavily upon editing to determine what gets seen and when), De Palma and Zsigmond enjoy shooting action in a single take, often with virtuoso camera movement. “We would sometimes do shots that lasted four or five minutes,” the cinematographer recalls. “Brian is very good at that — he knows exactly what he wants. It’s very easy for me to light those kinds of shots on his movies, because I know exactly where he wants the camera to go. And I know he’s going to use it all because he loves using those shots — and there’s no way to cut away. Sometimes he’d go five, six, eight or even 10 takes, knowing that the scene would play out as one shot on the screen.” Zsigmond finds this approach

Jack uses sophisticated audio equipment to monitor Sally’s meeting with Burke. After his frenzied pursuit of the pair leads him to crash his jeep through a department-store window, Jack awakens to discover Sally is in great danger, and he frantically tries to reach her.

rewarding: “The fewer cuts you have in a film, the more interesting it is to watch the scene. It’s like watching real life — you get up close to people and to the action and let the scene play out. Lately I’ve enjoyed working with Woody Allen, because he really is aiming for one shot with no coverage. No closeups, no over-the-shoulders. He wants to move the camera, and he does it in one continuous shot.” For Kiesser, shots like this meant a significant amount of responsibility. “When we were making Blow Out,” he says, “we didn’t have video playback. It was really on your shoulders as an operator to critically judge composition throughout the shot. You had the best seat in the house for all the critical deciww.theasc.com w

sions, like eyelines and framing, but nobody else was going to see the shot until dailies! We were also shooting wide open, so we needed to be very critical about focus.” Michael Gershman was the first AC on Blow Out and worked frequently with Kiesser. “Michael and I started our careers together in animation,” says Kiesser, “and we were on many crews together. Like all great focus pullers, Michael had an uncanny knack for focus — it was like a sixth sense. On Blow Out, he really had to multi-task, because some of those shots required zooming, focus-pulling and stop changes all at once.” Many of De Palma’s films contain at least one setup that spins the
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American Cinematographer - November 2011

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