American Cinematographer - March 1989 - 31

Barely surviving
shipwreck, the

a

characters strug¬

gle ashore. Below:
Rotunno and

employ

a
tower for

angle

crew

wooden
a camera

battle
photo¬
graphed in Spain.
on a

scene

Rotunno is convinced of

the

importance of looking for a

'short-cut' in relations with the

au¬

telling the film's adventures fantas¬
tically (the way Gilliam-director
and Gilliam-baron wanted it to

Photography, in his view,
has to create an immediate bridge
between screen and audience, by
trying to meet the visual needs of
those watching the movie. The
cinematographer's duty is to put the

and

audience in the situation of

to be

dience.

partici¬
pating in what is going on on the
screen as much as
possible, rather
than distracting attention through
photography.
In Terry Gilliam's motion
picture, Rotunno points out, the
complicating factor consisted of
transforming the director's inex¬
haustible fantasy into concrete and
manageable pictures: "You can not
just dream. You need dreams that
can be rendered visually in a clear
and plausible way. In other words,
you cannot just say, I want to make
something fantastic out of it. Cine¬
ma is
objective. It is through the
camera lens that the picture is pro¬
duced, and telling fantasy through
that lens is very hard indeed. I
hope," Rotunno adds, "that I suc¬
ceeded in going beyond the objec¬
tivity of the technical means, in

simply at the

order to make the

same

be),
time, in

story more acces¬

sible to the audience."
The movie
Arri

BL cameras,

lenses. The

reason

found,

as

was

shot with

using Zeiss

for the choice is

Rotunno tells it, "in

the fact that is

equipment allows
work even in the worst light
conditions. And, apart from the
quantitative point of view, this fea¬

you to

ture becomes of incredible rele¬

economically speaking, if
have to make a tremendously
expensive movie." The standard
system used was 1.85, with the
possibility of magnifying it to 1.66
or, if necessary, change it to 70mm.
There were no partic¬
ularly important camera moves uti¬
lized in the production, cautions
Rotunno. But, obviously, "we often
had to adopt special movements,
consistently with the scenes we
were filming. Inside Volcano, for
example, there were actors hanging
in the air by wires. The idea was
that Volcano, showing off his
vance

you

strength, must hold them in his
March 1989

hands. In that case, we had to avoid
any camera moves that would in¬
clude the wires in the shots. We had
many
era
as

such occasions. But the cam¬
generally, was invented

move,
a

show,

function of what
or

we

had to

not show."
Rotunno worked with

Eastman Kodak film stocks, find¬

ing that "Eastman is
film stock. It

a very

stable

grants me a greater

resistance. As

our
job is an endless
experimenting in fields that even

technical means, at times, cannot

American

Cinematographer

29
American Cinematographer - March 1989

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