4

Open Debate and Interviews with Movie Industry Professionals

Open Debate

The profile that emerges from the technical description of the Steadicam and an examination of some films on which it was used is of a useful and versatile device. The Steadicam, besides giving the operator freedom of movement, in almost all situations, also frees the actors. In fact, no longer constrained by dolly tracks or other structures, the actors move freely over the whole area of the action.

Bertrand Tavernier chose to use this device precisely for its capacity to follow the actor without limiting his actions: ‘I wanted to use it to give a great liberty to the actors, to be able to go everywhere without seeming to do so, to shoot very long takes’.¹

Giuseppe Rotunno, instead, finds that the same effects can be obtained with a good hand-held camera (and other means) and that, indeed, the abuse of this tool leads to sterility in the construction of stories: ‘I think that a lot of what is done with the Steadicam is an escape, especially if the director doesn’t know what to do and so, thinking he’ll give the scene more weight, he takes the Steadicam and goes’.²

Ed DiGiulio sees the Steadicam as an extension of the operator: ‘by supporting the total weight of the camera system from the body brace we permit the camera to move with the operator as if it were an extension of its own body (part of its internal servosystem, so to speak) so the operator can easily control and guide the camera in any direction he pleases with a gentle movement of his hand’.³

For M. Chion, this extension of the body represents a hybrid between technique and person that it might not be possible to tame: ‘Actually, the Steadicam is really a ‘cyborg’ device, a combination of man and machine, of muscle and mechanics as Boorman said – and the risk is that with such a device you don’t feel … either the one or the other: neither the muscle’s tension, nor the machine’s precision’.⁴

The argument which developed between Chion and Tavernier in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema is interesting for Chion’s assertions emphasizing the obvious and at times imprecise use of the Steadicam in Coup de Torchon: ‘The moves and the shots of Glenn’s camera are quite variable, unsteady, at times almost dancing’.⁵ Chion makes a comparison between The Shining and Coup de Torchon, as two of the first movies to use the Steadicam. While the first uses to advantage the spectacular characteristics of the device during the chases down the hallways, done with great precision, the second on the other hand, uses unstable camera moves and follows the characters ‘awkwardly’. Actually, for Tavernier this is a desirable effect that helps the construction of the film: ‘The Steadicam gave me a style of ‘mise en scene’ that continually led people into the ‘scene’ and tracked the characters as they looked at themselves, observed themselves … Also it gave me great freedom of movement’. The argument continues with an article by Tavernier in which he maintains that he never ‘used the Steadicam that much’ and a further reply by Chion: ‘In a work, it isn’t the frequency of a ‘method’ or a form that counts; it’s the way in which it defines the style. For their particularity and their presence at significant moments, Coup de Torchon is marked by its Steadicam sequences.⁶

Some ‘good sense’ regarding the use of this device, and whether it indeed determines how a story will be told, is provided by Garrett Brown: ‘Steadicam doesn’t ever determine story but offers some storytelling possibilities that permit more flexible and longer takes, if there is reason to continue uncut. Of course it’s a tool, frequently badly used like every tool, sometimes used in a manner to charm the gods’.⁷

Interviews

This final portion of the book contains a series of interviews with people who work in the movie industry. They generously expressed their opinions, told their stories, recalled anecdotes and experiences regarding the invention and the use of the Steadicam. These interviews enrich our knowledge of the Steadicam (past and present) by giving us the direct testimony of camera operators, Directors of Photography, and movie directors.

It is interesting to note the different approaches and points of view, the various criticisms and observations which, taken together, communicate a great passion for cinema, movie making and the constant creative invention which very often involves and stimulates technique.

I would like to thank each person interviewed for their kindness in giving of their time: Garrett Brown, Giuseppe Rotunno, John Carpenter, Mario Orfini, Larry McConkey, Nicola Pecorini, Haskell Wexler, Ed DiGiulio, Vittorio Storaro and Caroline Goodall.

Interview with Garrett Brown (by E-mail, January 1997)

What are the principal technical characteristics of the Steadicam?

Invention of Steadicam needs four things: a) expanded masses; b) angular isolation (with gimbal); c) spatial isolation (with spring-loaded arm that mimics a human arm); d) a method of viewfinding that doesn’t need the eye on the camera (such as a video monitor).

Figure 4.1 Workshop run by Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown during the festival ‘Una città per il Cinema’. Photo: Istituto Cinematografico ‘La Lanterna Magica’, L’Aquila Collection, 1982

Is it difficult to use the Steadicam?

Yes, it takes a workshop, then practice, practice – it’s an instrument.

Do you think that the fact that the vision you have in the Steadicam monitor (viewfinder) is so far from the body (as opposed to an ordinary camera where the viewfinder is near your eye) means that you frame the shot in a different way?

I prefer framing with the Steadicam monitor because I am used to it. Perhaps it’s a more objective look than a viewfinder, particularly for violent action.

Is there a link between the choice of the shot and the kind of tool utilized? I mean, are the Steadicam’s characteristics better suited to certain kinds of shots?

Yes – with overlap, of course, each tool is best for certain shots. Steadicam can stand still and look just like a tripod, but unless you intend to move before or after, what’s the point? My favourite kind of Steadicam shot is when it is used just like a dolly (see next answer).

What do you think about the point of view shot, seeing with the character’s eyes?

I have studied point of view shots. My favourites are with Steadicam – I don’t like hand-held point of views, because I think of the frame as a window and I don’t like my window shaking.

Has Steadicam changed the way films are made or is it only a tool?

The process of filming has changed with Steadicam, but only because some new things are possible and some other things are easier. Each successful tool has this effect on the business aspect, as well as on the creative aspect, of filmmaking.

What are the most important and significant movies in which you used the Steadicam?

Out of nearly 200 movies, The Shining was the most significant for Steadicam use.

Do you find that today the search for content is lacking because it is easier to fill the eyes of the viewer with special effects (such as unbelievable escapes)?

I have the same requirement of special effects as for stunts or regular shots: absolute believability and appropriateness. Otherwise they are not very interesting.

When you thought up this tool, did you imagine something that could approximate human vision?

Yes … and I was looking for a fast-running stunt camera. Only later did I realize that it could be great, therefore didn’t know what it was good for.

What were the first movies to utilize the Steadicam, up to about 1985?

Bound for Glory, Marathon Man, Rocky were all shot during 1975. Some others, at least up through the 1980s, are: Rocky II, The Shining, True Confessions, Greystoke, Falling in Love, Sweet Liberty, Fame, Taps, Prince of the City, Xanadu, Baby It’s You, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Have you used the Steadicam in other fields such as TV, theatre, dance, video?

Yes, except theatre. Others have, but not me personally.

Do you think that this tool is more about the sense of movement and capturing it?

It is about placing the lens where you want it, and moving it to where you want it next, in the manner that you want to move.

When you invent something like the Steadicam or the Skycam are you answering someone’s particular requirements?

I invent for myself first – usually because I want one!

Do you think that the use of Steadicam is linked exclusively with a particular genre of movies?

No!

Have there have been situations in which the use of Steadicam was less successful than using dolly and crane together?

Of course. It is just a tool – frequently badly used like every tool. Sometimes used ‘in a manner to charm the gods’.

What do you think about camera moves using dolly, crane, zoom – the possibilities and limits?

I love camera movement – some of it historically has been influenced by the limitations of dolly and crane, now we have a better, full spectrum of tools, and now it is less likely that one would be forced into an arbitrary style of movement because, for example, the Steadicam didn’t exist.

How much does the Steadicam determine the story and the way it is told?

Steadicam doesn’t ever determine the story, but offers some storytelling possibilities that permit more flexible and longer takes, if there is reason to continue uncut. It also permits more sophisticated camera movement in three dimensions – French curves, etc., rather that straight ahead over the dolly rails.

The Steadicam has speeded up a number of situations that would otherwise be impossible or very expensive. Do you think that this speed can cause contents and lighting to receive less attention?

Yes, sometimes. There have been some atrocities because Steadicam is so facile. It’s regrettable. One could think of easy analogies: the invention of the tripod meant cameras didn’t have to be placed on piled up furniture, and this extra speed may have caused some sloppy work!

What are the difficulties involved in lighting a scene that uses the Steadicam?

Being able to see in all directions during the course of a long shot has required the perfection of some particular lighting techniques: adroit dimmer work, etc., to keep the hot side always as backlight, etc.

Garrett Brown, Steadicam Inventor

Garrett Brown began by making TV commercials and opted for movies after he invented the Steadicam camera stabilizer in 1974. During his prolific career he has shot nearly 200 movies with the Steadicam, and invented a series of extraordinary tools for shooting movies, television, sports events and concerts. Garrett currently holds fifty patents worldwide for camera devices, including the Steadicam JR for camcorders; Skycam, which flies on wires over sporting events; Mobycam, the underwater camera; the Go.cam and the Fly.cam, miniature tracking cameras, and the Emmy award-winning Dive.cam.

He has worked steadily to perfect the quality of his inventions and increase their capacity to shoot under the most difficult conditions.

He shared an Oscar (Class I Award) with Cinema Products in April, 1978 for the invention and development of the Steadicam, as well as winning an Emmy in 1989.

Garrett Brown is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers, the Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He also organizes and teaches Steadicam workshops all over the world.

Films

Some of the films on which he worked are: Bound for Glory, H. Ashby (1976); Marathon Man, J. Schlesinger (1976); Rocky, J. Avildsen (1976); Exorcist II: The Heretic, J. Boorman (1977); Rocky II, S. Stallone (1979); Kramer vs. Kramer, R. Benton (1979); The Shining, S. Kubrick (1980); Fame, A. Parker (1980); The Formula, J. Avildsen (1980); True Confessions, U. Grosbard (1981); Reds, W. Beatty (1981); Taps, H. Becker (1981); Wolfen, M. Wadleigh (1981); Tootsie, S. Pollack (1982); Greystoke – The Legend of Tarzan Lord of the Apes, H. Hudson (1984); Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, S. Spielberg (1984); Legal Eagles, I. Reitman (1986); Rocky V, J. Avildsen (1990); Philadelphia, J. Demme (1993); The Return of the Jedi, R. Marquand (1993); Wolf, M. Nichols (1994); Casino, M. Scorsese (1995); Bullworth, W. Beatty (1998/99); Bringing out the Dead, M. Scorsese (1999).

Interview with Giuseppe Rotunno, Rome, February, 1997

Preface by Giuseppe Rotunno

The Steadicam is a mechanical device like many others: in other words, great movies have been made without the Steadicam. The Steadicam hasn’t resolved the problem of movies, because, in a certain sense it has always existed, people had started to think of the Steadicam a long time ago. I mean to say, we Italians have always used the hand-held camera, even when the Steadicam didn’t exist yet, it’s just that we never made a show of it. I mean no one ever thought about it, but I think every Italian movie has a part that was done with the hand-held camera.

Finally, I think that all technical devices are useful and very important, including the Steadicam, if they help us to tell the story, if they help us to stay within the story. However, I’m completely against the possibility of a movie being conceived for the Steadicam, as if you had to conceive a movie for a camera car or any other device outside the story. The Steadicam, overall, is very important if it is used with awareness of the reason for using it, in other words, if it helps to tell the story.

It is exactly, and only, a device.

How do you choose a camera move?

As is needed. In other words, you must never forget that in a certain sense the camera is the moviegoer, so you can’t take it by the throat and take it around just to take it around. I think that a lot of what is done with the Steadicam is an escape, especially if the director doesn’t know what to do and so, thinking he’ll give the scene more weight, he takes the Steadicam and goes. It’s not like that.

An example of Steadicam that instead is very effective is in Kubrick’s movie The Shining, in which the Steadicam puts the viewer in the position of the characters, suspended in midair; in this case this floating sensation that the Steadicam gives is very effective and perhaps it couldn’t be done with any other device. Even if, for example, with Fellini we did it with the arm of a crane with the camera on it, moving slightly, which is always a good way to give the idea of being suspended in midair, that is to say, detaching the actors from the ground and, obviously, putting the viewer in the same conditions. When all these things meet up, story, technique, lighting and, of course, movement, then it becomes something important.

It happened back in Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) cinema: the people who had serious cinematographic values remained and the others disappeared – the ones who substituted mechanical means for the story, telling just a very limited technical part, forgetting the story. It’s always stories that make history.

Even long shots without cuts have always been done, for that matter – think of Hitchcock’s Rope.

Does there have to be a different kind of lighting for Steadicam movement?

No, lighting has its own particular significance. Lighting too, in my opinion, is part of the story. It can’t be done as a function of the technical device. Above all, it has to be a function of the story. Then it’s the technical means that has to adapt to both the lighting and the story. Overall, there aren’t any technical or emotional, artistic elements in the making of a movie that aren’t part of the story, that aren’t tied to the story. You have to keep in mind that the lens is always the viewer, so you can involve it in the movements if necessary, but this can’t be done haphazardly, it has to be done at the right time, when it’s needed. I cited Kubrick because in that case the thing is explicit, clear.

They say that using the Steadicam saves time; it’s not true. Some movies might use shortcuts of this kind, but the Steadicam is not a time-saving device, because to prepare for that shot, Kubrick took a whole day, sometimes even two days, because he took possession of the means he was using, he didn’t let it take possession of him. In other words, he dominated it. He used it correctly for his story, and this is true for everything in the movies, but particularly for the Steadicam or the hand-held camera (which is the same thing): you can’t abuse it, or try to solve the movie’s, or the story’s, problems with it. With the hand-held camera, the Steadicam, the crane, a free dolly or an idea for a particular shot, everything has to be always a function of the story. That’s my particular point of view and I don’t think it’s only mine.

Is there a relation between Steadicam use and the kinds of films that abuse it?

I think that when we think of the Steadicam we always think of action films, for example, chasing someone up a flight of stairs, which isn’t easy because you need exactly the same amount of time that you need if you’re using an offset arm. In other words, even if you put the camera on a dolly, on an arm, you can follow the person as far as you want to.

There are very, very few cases in which the Steadicam is irreplaceable: for example, if on the stairs you have to cross over and enter another stairwell; but precisely because I want to do something that I can’t do with another device I have to do what serves the purposes of the story. There are the entrances and the exits which can also let you save time and, among other things, you don’t have to go the entire route to tell it cinematographically, you only have to tell a portion of it. In fact, you normally would do just a portion of it to give the movie a better rhythm, to not go on too long.

Now, sometimes instead with the Steadicam they take too long so they can show that it couldn’t have been done with another device. But that same scene could be told with the same effectiveness, and maybe even more, in less time.

Does the Steadicam really speed things up?

No, it slows things down. If you follow a moving object, you go more slowly. If you stay still, or it moves in front of you or it goes away or comes closer, the internal dynamics of the scene are more effective. In other words, everything has to be used with awareness and professionalism, because you need to know that if, while you’re using that device, you increase or diminish the speed of the story, you are increasing or diminishing the speed of the shot’s contents. That’s what you need to know how to evaluate and then use the Steadicam too if it’s needed, but only if it’s needed.

Regarding control of the supporting structure, can the Steadicam be stopped at the desired point?

With great difficulty. One shot that we did in Wolf⁸ with Garrett took a whole night and then it was cut because it never did come out well. I had already suggested we cut it, because I had designed it with a crane, an arm with the Steadicam on it, which accompanied the characters up to a certain point and then there was a cut, an out of shot. It was a terribly long shot to do and then it was cut after all. Then and there people thought that I didn’t want to do it or that I was having trouble with the lighting for it, but the lighting was always the same.

It involved going from the starting point, which was at the top of some stairs, towards a house where there was a party, where the two characters meet, they go down the stairs and towards a certain place. Doing it in pieces, in other words, one part going down using the crane, then cutting away from the scene and then instead of starting from the same place, starting 150 m further along with the house already behind them, would have made it more effective as a story.

Following that movement realistically you have a meaningless view in the background for 150 m. We did it with the Steadicam and they cut that piece, they had to enlarge the scene optically to be able to change it.

You know that to cut directly onto the same scene – they made it worse than what I had suggested.

Are there movies (for example, remakes) that are able to tell the story better because of the technical means that exist today (Steadicam, Skycam, etc.)?

No, I never had a problem with equipment being mechanically inadequate, but then I’ve made a lot of movies and sometimes the lack of something makes you think better, and more, and find solutions without leaving them to someone else. ‘Here, this could go there, I can do it anyway with that’. You have to think what exactly would be most effective and then do it. I never suffered from not having the Steadicam, not even now that it’s available, that it’s used. I have pictures of Blasetti many years ago with a sort of Steadicam he’d designed – a little helmet with a camera mounted on it, it was the same thing, more or less. Let me say once more, however, that the hand-held camera has always been in use here in Italy and not only here, also abroad, I think.

Can the Steadicam be considered a refinement of a technique that already existed?

Yes, just like film has gotten better, but it’s still film. It’s more sensitive, it needs less light.

What about the fact that the Steadicam moves sideways, that it can move more smoothly?

It’s more limiting than a hand-held camera, if you consider the effect. The smoothness of the movement is another question, but this isn’t always useful. The braking is dangerous, in my opinion.

What do you think about Steadicam shots with regard to framing?

By preceding someone who’s walking, you don’t make things go faster (apart from the fact that you can do it with any device: a dolly, a dolly with a jib arm, a camera car, a car, by hand). If you want to accelerate the movement behind you, you have to take it from a three-quarter view, because then the speed of what you have behind you is greater.

Even dollies, if they’re not used carefully, won’t increase the speed or rapidity of the movements or, say, the feeling of movement; they can absorb it, deaden it. Following a person means, I repeat, absorbing his movement, because you do the same movements and 30–40 per cent of it is lost, absorbed by your following him. So you have to really understand it.

Also, you see, the positions for preceding someone are always a little bit awkward and then they lengthen the time, as I said, and this is contrary to our modern style because the modern style is to tell a movie more rapidly, in the sense of skipping lots of parts of the story that were once thought necessary. The public today catches on sooner. In other words, if from this hallway you have to go outside and you want to follow someone on the stairs, all you have to see is someone who’s running away, you catch him again down below and you’ve cut out a whole piece giving exactly the same idea, without losing anything of the story but with a speed which is three or four times greater; the editing is faster. In other words, time, the seconds that you take to tell it are more rapid when you cut away than when you follow, because that’s real time, the other is cinematographic time.

With regard to screenplay, should it be decided from the beginning if Steadicam is to be used?

Not nowadays, if someone does it it’s very rare. You write a screenplay because you think first of all of the story, then if someone wants to do a story for the Steadicam, that’s different. But normally someone writes a screenplay, tells about human events, about human moods, and then later studies the means.

Are all camera moves studied later?

Certainly, all of them later. First you have to find where you’ll be shooting; after having done the screenplay you look for the locations, to decide where to shoot – there has to be an office, a major street, big stores – in other words, what the story needs and after that, according to where they are, and, again, according to the time that you want to give to that move, that scene, you choose the technical means.

Have you ever used the Steadicam in other fields – TV, dance, etc.?

In TV they don’t know how, they move the camera as if they invented it, instead they make you sick at the stomach, it’s really annoying.

A story has to have a life of its own and then, afterwards, the technical means should make the passage from the screen to the viewer clearer, taking the words and translating them into images. Let the viewer get inside the story and be captured by it, in other words, become part of it.

Giuseppe Rotunno, Director of Photography

Giuseppe Rotunno first worked as a still photographer at Cinecittà, with Arturo Bragaglia and, later, as a camera assistant before becoming a camera operator on several movies, beginning with Rossellini’s L’uomo della Croce.

In 1953 he made his debut as Director of Photography on Visconti’s Senso. He has become an important cinematographer at the international level. As well as for his early work in black-and-white, he is well known for the particularly warm quality of his colour photography.

During the 1970s he often worked with Fellini and, in the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked on many Hollywood productions. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the cinematography of All That Jazz (1979). He has been awarded many prizes for his work.

He has been a Professor of Cinematography at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia di Roma since 1988.

Films

His films include Le notti bianche, L. Visconti (1957); La grande guerra, M. Monicelli (1959); Rocco ei suoi fratelli, L. Visconti (1960); L’ultima spiaggia, S. Kramer (1959); Il gattopardo, L. Visconti (1969); Roma, F. Fellini (1969); Amarcord, F. Fellini (1973); Casanova, F. Fellini (1976); Prova d’orchestra, F. Fellini (1978); All That Jazz, B. Fosse (1979); Popeye, R. Altman (1979–1980); Five Days One Summer, F. Zinneman (1982); E la nave va, F. Fellini (1982–1983); American Dreamer, R. Rosenthal (1983); Rent a Cop,

J. London (1986–1987); The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, T. Gilliam (1987–1988); Mio caro Dottor Grasller, R. Faenza (1989); Regarding Henry, M. Nichols (1990); Wolf, M. Nichols (1994); Sabrina, S. Pollack (1995); La sindrome di Stendhal, D. Argento (1995); Io mi ricordo, si io mi ricordo, M. Mastroianni and A. M. Tatò (1996).

Interview with John Carpenter (by fax), December, 1998

I decided to interview John Carpenter under the mistaken impression that he had used the Steadicam in his film Halloween. In the late 1970s, in fact, the Panaglide, a Steadicam clone, responded to the same technical and narrative requirements as did the Steadicam.

I analysed the movie and studied a number of sequences in point of view that demonstrated a Steadicam effect, without knowing that they were actually done with the Panaglide. I think it is important, nonetheless, to include the observations I made upon seeing the movie, since the narrative intention in using the Panaglide is equivalent to that of the Steadicam.

In the interview which follows the discussion of Halloween, Carpenter discusses the technical and other reasons which led him to use the Panaglide in response to questions I had formulated about using the Steadicam.

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

The film tells the story of a babysitter who confronts, on the night of Halloween, an escaped maniac from a mental hospital who, when a child, had killed his sister.

I must emphasize that the comments made about Halloween concern exclusively the film’s ‘Steadicam effect’ and the use of the Steadicam/Panaglide to recreate subjective vision. This film was one of the first to use this device to represent subjective vision and to show us, without the annoying shaking that would make the camera too evident, what the killer sees as he murders his first victim.

The Panaglide is used from the first sequence to show what the killer sees as he draws close, following every step from the outside (garden) to the inside of the house in a continuous movement. In this way it is used both as the perfect embodiment of the character’s vision and as a recording of his movement (through the garden, entering the house, going through the kitchen, up the stairs to the room).

The effect of suspense is accentuated by the sound of his breathing, full of potentially aggressive connotations, as he puts on a mask, takes a knife in the kitchen and moves through the house in search of his victim.

The narrative gaze does not give us an objective distance from things, rather, it involves us in the killer’s movements and leads us in a single, long shot to the murder, which is revealed as having been done by a child.

During the film the narrator does not want to give us information about the identity of the killer or, at least, we are not shown his face and thus cannot recognize him. We have thus an ‘explicitly denied portrayal’ that always shows us only part of him, never his face, or else shows him through what he is seeing as he spies on and follows the other characters. An example of this is the shot in which a boy, leaving school, runs towards us, the camera moves slightly to the left and the boy bumps into someone, looks at him, is scared, the unknown person holds him away from him and then lets him go. We see the head of the man who, after the boy has run away, stays there for a minute, then turns and goes to the left, slightly anticipated by the Panaglide, and finally walks along the school fence following another child, with the camera always at his side but never showing us his face.

We have seen that the story begins with a point of view of one of the main characters, the murderer; everything is seen through his eyes and in first person. For the first five minutes he is at the controls, then, after the murder, a more neutral narration takes over, the vision becomes total and no longer seems to belong to one specific character.

The tension in the movie is created by the question of which character is seeing what is on screen and the narrative voice continues to play this game, simulating and hindering the vision, limiting the audience’s knowledge. Thus the narrator, who coincides with the camera, seeks to maintain its role as giver of information and allows itself to linger on and ‘reframe’ certain situations in order not to give us a total picture of the murderer.

What is your opinion of the usefulness of the Steadicam in filmmaking?

The Steadicam has become a basic photographic tool in the movie industry; beyond useful, the Steadicam has become seminal.

When did you see the Steadicam used for the first time and what about it impressed you?

I became fascinated by the Steadicam after I saw a shot in The Exorcist II, of all things. It was a bird’s point of view, I believe, swooping down a street somewhere. It was not a hand-held effect – rather, a gliding, sweeping shot. Extremely cool.

When and why did you decide to use it in one of your films?

I first used the Steadicam in a television movie, Someone’s Watching Me, in 1978. I photographed Lauren Hutton dashing around her apartment, and her moving point of view of same. It was great. Immediately after this, I made Halloween.

I used Panaglide in Halloween, and have in almost every movie since. Panaglide is a Panavision-built Steadicam designed for use with Panavision anamorphic (widescreen) lenses. The Panavision anamorphic lenses are heavier than spherical lenses (standard 1.85 format), therefore requiring an operator with a great deal of lower-back strength. I strapped on the Panaglide and began walking around with it back in 1978 – for about 15 seconds. I screamed, ‘get this damn thing off me!’. It was a very disappointing day – I had dreams of operating the Panaglide myself. No lower-back strength.

Is your filmmaking technique – past and present – influenced by the particular features the Steadicam offers?

The effect of the Panaglide on screen is fascinating. Footage photographed with a Panaglide falls somewhere between the effect of a conventional dolly-operated shot and a documentary-style hand-held shot. The gyroscope in a Panaglide smoothes out the jerks and jitters of hand-held footage [author’s note: this is a common misconception; there is no gyroscope in either the Steadicam or the Panaglide], thus it resembles a dolly-shot. But there is a slight sailing or drifting effect. The Panaglide makes the image float [author’s note: practised Steadicam operators consider this ‘floating’ effect the giveaway of an unskilled operator].

Panaglide/Steadicam liberated the dolly move. Now an operator can strap on the camera and follow actors up and down stairs, in and out of buildings, over hills and valleys.

Whenever I direct a movie, I try to know as much as possible about the photographic equipment I’m using. I need to know how long it will take to set up a certain shot and what effect I want that shot to express. One of the issues I’ve confronted in the past is the moving point of view shot, in which a character is walking or running or basically on the move physically. I want to photograph, then, two different shots, to get the audience to identify with this character.

If you watch Alfred Hitchcock’s films, you’ll see he used a conventional dolly to photograph actor and moving point of view. I wanted to use the Panaglide instead. The freedom of movement, the gliding effect, the speed and mobility of shooting – it was all a plus.

Do you think the Steadicam has changed the manner of filmmaking?

See above.

To what extent is the Steadicam a tool of the narrator and to what extent can it be a narrator itself?

To discuss the aesthetics of Panaglide as a tool of the narrator or narration, I’d like to stop briefly at a boring history lesson.

There are really only two distinct styles of cinema. One is Russian montage. Think of Eisenstein, the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. A montage is a series of shots cut together very quickly, creating excitement in the audience regardless of image content. A television commercial is exciting to watch because the images flash by so fast. A modern action film such as Armageddon is exciting because every scene is a rapid montage. It resembles a person watching a flickering light.

The second basic cinematic style is German Expressionism. It involves long shots, often single takes, usually with camera movement, exploring an environment, revealing characters or action. Think of Orson Welles, the opening tracking shot in Touch of Evil, plus the one that occurs later in the picture that takes place in the motel room. The emotional effects of German expression are excitement in the grandeur and sweep of a locale, a melancholy and sometimes anxious feeling regarding characters and locations. The Panaglide can be used to service both forms of cinematic style. It can become narrator or narration.

When making a film, what are the reasons for which you choose the Steadicam for a particular scene (from a technical and narrative point of view)?

See above.

What do you think of the point of view shot? Can you tell me something about using it in Halloween, i.e. the choice to have the Steadicam take the character’s point of view? Do you think the Steadicam was essential in realizing your narrative intention?

I love point of view shots and sequences. I made the Panaglide double for both characters’ point of view and narration point of view. It was absolutely essential for narrative intention.

What do think about hand-held shots and how they indicate the use of a cinematic tool as well as making the filmmaker’s presence felt?

Hand-held shots give the sense of chaotic movement. The audience doesn’t really intellectualize it the way you have, sensing the presence of the operator. They accept hand-held as moving chaos.

What do you think of the possibilities the Steadicam offers in terms of continuous or real-time shooting (in the sense of the possibility of following an action without interruptions of space and time)?

See above.

Do you think there is an abuse of the use of the Steadicam?

See above.

Do you always work with the same Steadicam operator(s)?

No.

Speaking as an author and narrator, how do you use the camera – as narrating eye, as third-person narrator, etc.? Is your choice influenced by the means you are using for filming? How?

My choice of using the camera as narrating eye or third-person narrator is influenced by the story, characters and intention of the scene I’m shooting.

Is the Steadicam such a strong means that it ends up imposing a certain style or can it be controlled by the filmmaker?

Any movie technology can be controlled by a director, given that he or she understands its strengths and weaknesses.

Does the fact that the Steadicam is such a versatile instrument affect the way you control the framing and shooting of an image? How much of what occurs in Steadicam shots is planned and how much is determined during shooting by the operator?

I dictate the direction of the Panaglide. During a shot, the operator watches the framing on a small television monitor attached to the rig itself. I’m right behind him, following along, watching both the shot and the actors in front of the camera.

Do you think the Steadicam will be responsible for creating a film genre (or has it done so already)?

No.

John Carpenter, Director and Composer

John Carpenter began making short films in 1962, winning an academy award for Best Short Subject (Live Action) in 1970 for The Resurrection of Bronco Billy. He has worked in the film industry in numerous capacities – as a writer, actor, composer, editor, producer and director. He co-wrote the screenplays and composed the intense musical scores for all his movies. He is particularly interested in horror and thriller genres, blended with the fantastic. He is sometimes credited as Frank Armitage, Rip Haight, Martin Quatermass or John T. Chance.

Films

As a director his films include: Dark Star (1973); Assault on Precinct 13 (1976); Someone Watching Me! (TV)(1978); Halloween (1978); Elvis (TV) (1979); The Fog (1980); Escape from New York (1981); The Thing (1982); Christine (1983); Starman (1984); Big Trouble in Little China (1986); Prince of Darkness (1987); They Live (1988); Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992); Body Bags (TV) (segments The Gas Station, Hair) (1993); Village of the Damned (1995); In the Mouth of Madness (1995); Escape from L.A. (1996); Vampires (1998).

Interview with Mario Orfini, Rome, July 1998

When did you first use the Steadicam?

I’m not sure, I think it was in Mamba.

Does the Steadicam condition your choice of how to shoot a scene?

Yes, the Steadicam can condition your choice of how to shoot a scene and that’s why the Steadicam has a lot of mistakes on its conscience – because people treat it as if it were the director, in every sense of the word. It’s not the director, because anyway it’s just a tool, and the person using it has to know how to direct it.

Eighty per cent of the time, in what I’ve seen of the Steadicam in Italy – in America much less – it’s used wrongly, taking advantage of and abusing its worth; in other words, it’s used automatically, without understanding its real value and real effectiveness. The Steadicam, like other cinematographic tools, can modify language and, if it’s used haphazardly, it leads to enormous mistakes.

The most important thing is choosing when to use it, on the basis of what you want to express and narrate. Lots of times I’ve found myself deciding whether to use the Steadicam, the hand-held camera or the dolly, and I’ve had to think about what was important to narrate, about what I wanted to tell. And when I’d thought about it I’d say, I’ve chosen the hand-held camera or the dolly or the Steadicam, whichever, but I was always very sure of my choice. I could see in my head what I wanted to do and which was the right tool to use to get the result I wanted. So for me personally it’s never been a problem.

Is there a difference between predicting the effect of a dolly shot and the effect of a Steadicam shot?

No, I don’t think so, because a dolly might seem to be something simple that you know very well because it’s in your genetic code – it was around a hundred years before the Steadicam so it’s lodged deep within the layers of the director’s memory, the person who knows how to narrate with images and how to translate words into images. The dolly is part of our inherited knowledge, our heritage. The Steadicam comes along as the last tool, so then you have to decide if you’ll use the dolly or the Steadicam.

And when do you decide to use the Steadicam?

When it’s impossible to use the dolly or the hand-held camera I can depend on the Steadicam, but in this way I’m running the risk of undervaluing it. The Steadicam, besides having a language of its own, has something more, though it can substitute for an aspect of a dolly or a hand-held camera.

When you shot Mamba was the Steadicam very important?

No, when I was thinking about Mamba I never took into consideration what tools I would use. At the beginning, right before we started to make it, I said I wanted the Steadicam as well, because it could be useful, but I hadn’t planned at all where, or how, or when. I thought up all the Steadicams in that movie one morning from 7:00 to 8:00, while I was being driven to Cinecitta. The fact that I had to have a Steadicam available caused a lot of trouble for everyone, but since I was the producer I could decide, and so one was made available.

Were there difficulties with using the Steadicam in that movie?

No, not at all. However, I can tell you that in the last movie I made, L’Anniversario, I did have problems with using the Steadicam, not because of the instrument but because of the operator. He was very, very good at his job, but one day when I had to do a difficult Steadicam shot – he had to start in front of the actor and then go around to follow him, with a double circle around a table at which the actor was sitting, then go out the door, with the door acting as a curtain, go away, climb on a dolly that raised him up, and shoot the actor as he appeared in the doorway in a Full Shot (FS) to give the idea of the total breakdown of this character who psychologically had lost his entire vision of life. I needed to show him isolated in this doorway, seen from above. The operator had a 40° fever and he couldn’t control the Steadicam – not its weight, which would be a banal consideration of the job that a Steadicam operator does, but he couldn’t get the right tension. The operator and the Steadicam are two parts of a whole, and they breathe together. Seeing him in difficulty, I had a feeling of the Steadicam being in difficulty as well, and I did something that I don’t think anyone else would have done. I used the Steadicam sequence in which he had had the most trouble. This situation enabled me to obtain a strange mechanism of liaison: when there was one mistake, it seemed like a mistake; when there were two, three, four, imperceptible mistakes it seemed like the Steadicam was breathing, as if it took a breath and wanted to get closer to the character it was showing us. In the end we got a really beautiful sequence.

Does the fact that the Steadicam makes it possible to shoot a series of free movements mean that you tend to simplify the story?

I don’t think it conditions the way you shoot the story. For me personally, no. First I think of how I want to compose the shot. It would be a big mistake if I were to follow the tool and not what I want to tell. You could say that it’s more true for television than for movies (except for ‘B’ movies).

What do you think of point of view shots?

A point of view is almost always shot with a hand-held camera, sometimes with a dolly, and sometimes it is better to use the Steadicam for it. It depends on what you want to say and how you want to say it. The Steadicam is absolutely a tool that you have to know how to use, because if it’s used badly it’s wrong, like with all tools.

Does the Steadicam impose a certain style?

It can’t impose a style, because if it imposes a style it means that the director wasn’t able to control it.

Can it lead to the creation of a new genre?

I don’t know about that. It can at times be conditioning, and thus I’m contradicting what I said earlier a little bit, when a sequence or a scene is being made. I can say that in the last movie I made I used the Steadicam four or five times and I massacred two of them when I was doing the editing, because I realized that in order to have the softness and flow of the Steadicam I was losing the rhythm. Because with the Steadicam, you also get the intervals when nothing is happening. You can do that in television, but not with movies. For example, there’s a scene in which Laura Morante, the main character, goes out, I’m in front of her and I follow her as she closes a series of doors behind her, and I kept jumping from one to the other. You could do an entire movie in Steadicam but it would be an exception. But in my situation I realized in doing the entire sequence with the Steadicam that in the end when we edited it I had to cut a lot to have the rhythm I wanted. That doesn’t take away from the fact that the Steadicam parts that we kept in the movie are beautiful, just right.

From an author’s point of view, how do the means of shooting influence your choices?

The means must influence your choices, because if you’re deciding how you’re going to tell something you ask yourself what tool you’ll use, and then you choose it on the basis of the various characteristics and on what you’re telling.

How do you use the camera – as a narrative eye, as a third-person narrator?

Both things, and not only those, also in a lot of other ways, because there are situations in which you see in first person and then a second later you feel the need to step aside and look at the situation objectively. For example in my last movie, I had a situation of guests in a house after a dinner party, and the hosts and their friends use a language in which the uselessness of words and gestures is exalted. What they say has no real content. There are two women in this group who have something dramatic in them, and that needs to be seen in a different way. In this case, I thought that to be able to distinguish between these two ways of narrating, I had to do something with the camera, and I shot from up high, flattening the actors, seeing the heads and the noses of the people talking, and other times they were placed a little differently and you could see a little of their faces. But I made it feel like a vertical shot that nullified them, flattening them to the ground.

How do you control the shot with such a versatile tool?

I think that you can calculate everything, and what the operator makes happen is that little extra touch that comes from the camera being sort of a part of the operator’s body. That’s the sensitivity the operator has. It’s like ballet, if you see Carla Fracci or Maya Plissetskaya you realize, you can feel, how they’re able to become light, and you can feel when a ballerina is too heavy, too hard, etc. This is what the Steadicam operator gives you, and a good camera operator gives it to you as well, that you don’t feel the camera and he and it are one. He feels the image and he makes it his own, moment after moment, capturing it in the lens.

Can using the Steadicam change the narrative message?

No.

Do you think the Steadicam is abused?

Yes, enormously, by everyone who uses it in the wrong way.

What is your relationship with the viewer, with regard to his getting narrative information?

I think that in the end the viewer understands everything, so I put myself in a position to be able to give him what I see, which is very important. I mean to say, I don’t become a narrator who is present, a narrator who’s also the object of the narrative. In this movie, L’Anniversario, I used two cameras a lot, but not one next to the other, like in ‘Put a 200 here, and a 100 underneath’. No. ‘Put a 200 here and a 40 down there at the far end’. They couldn’t figure out where to put the lights and the mikes anymore, but I didn’t care and I was right, because like that I always had an ‘eye-witness’ to the events. In other words, I observed a situation and then to make it more important, to reaffirm the narrative importance of that situation, I asked a witness to watch and to say ‘It’s okay like this’, and the witness was off to one side and it was another camera. For the viewer it was as if the second camera was him looking at the scene from a different viewpoint.

What do you think of shots with the hand-held camera?

The hand-held camera is a tool like the Steadicam, or the dolly. As with all tools, you have to overcome your prejudices or get something straight: behind the gaze of the hand-held camera, behind the gaze of the Steadicam, behind the gaze of any lens, there is always a viewer, the one who’s watching. The director is a mediator, someone who’s telling a story. He uses these tools to tell the story. If he’s good at his job, he tells it to you well, and if he’s not, he tells it to you badly.

The viewer is the one who sees it and he’s the one who feels himself embodied by the lens at that moment, so if I use the hand-held camera and the hand-held camera is more present, it’s because in that moment the director has chosen to narrate with the hand-held camera. The birth of the Steadicam didn’t eliminate the hand-held camera.

In my last movie I used both the hand-held camera and the Steadicam a lot, according to the situation. There were things which were unthinkable for the Steadicam; for example, the husband saying to his wife ‘Now I’m going to throw you out of the house’ and he takes her and drags her down the stairs to finish packing her stupid suitcase so that she’ll leave. At that point, I didn’t have any doubts at all about whether to use the Steadicam or the hand-held camera, I used the hand-held camera because the tension of the break-up of their relationship was that of the hand-held camera. If I’d used the Steadicam I would have annulled the roughness of the scene. The action was more physical and if I had softened it, because with the Steadicam I would have softened it, I would have ruined that scene. So they’re two different things.

What do you think about continuous shots?

I think very highly of them when they’re not abused and when they’re not used wrongly. When they’re done with the Steadicam, which does the job much better because it can do the ‘impossible tracking shot’ or the ‘impossible dolly’ and lets you do things that would be impossible by any other means, almost always the main mistake is wanting to keep the entire shot, to say ‘Look what a great 7-minute shot I did!’. Orson Welles would be rolling over in his grave. Instead, you have to use the Steadicam to do tracking shots, dolly shots that would be impossible, but then you have to cut them in editing to eliminate the things that pollute the shot, including the times when nothing is happening.

In the example I gave earlier, the Steadicam helped me create an almost magical sequence. Then, evidently, the Steadicam did its work well, it became a violin that was playing beautifully, despite the fever. You could feel that the bad shape the operator was in matched perfectly the bad shape the character was in, which was what the Steadicam was telling you about, and the whole thing increased the total effect. Although it’s true that if a Steadicam shot has a mistake it should be done over, in this case it was the contrary: the tool – the Steadicam, which was breathing with the operator – took on the same feverish and weak conditions the operator was in, recording the feeling, and shooting the character’s drama with his same feelings.

Mario Orfini, Producer and Director

Mario Orfini worked for years as a reporter for a variety of European and international publications, writing for Pannunzio’s Monao and Espresso. He also worked as a photographer for the Piccolo Teatro of Giorgio Strehler.

He is a producer with a curriculum rich in discoveries and sophisticated quality films by authors such as E. Greco, R. Faenza, F. Carpi and others. From 1991 to 1992 he was responsible for production at Titanus Distribuzione.

Recently he has been financial co-producer for the film New Rose Hotel, directed by A. Ferrara.

He is the president of Millennium Productions.

Films

He directed Explosion (1971); Noccioline a colazione (1978); Mamba (1988); Jackpot (1992); L’anniversario (1999).

Interview with Larry McConkey, Perugia, October, 1998

I would like to know what you think about the point of view shot.

It’s the most difficult thing I have to do, but it can be the most rewarding. One nice thing about the Steadicam is that it can mimic the motion of human eyesight better than any other currently available technique. As you walk, your head is naturally bobbing up and down with every step, along with some side to side motion, and accelerations to the front and back that are less significant visually, but next time you think of it, notice while walking that you tend to focus on something in the distance and keep that steady, while the rest of the world, normally the foreground, moves up and down relative to it, and of course, a little side to side as well. This is a remarkable form of image stabilization that is just natural to us, and the Steadicam, because it is inertially stable, tends to do the same thing. In fact, a good operator will not only make the background steady but the foreground as well. This is a kind of hyper-natural form of image stabilization. So first of all that’s why the Steadicam is so nice for trying to represent point of view shots – because it’s seems pretty natural.

Figure 4.2 Larry McConkey at the International Steadicam Workshop, Perugia, Italy, 1998. Photo: Serena Ferrara

The more difficult part of representing an actual point of view is deciding what to show in the very narrow field of view that almost all lenses provide, particularly the normal-focal-length lenses that present a perspective that closely matches our own eyesight. As you walk, you tend to glance quickly around at a number of things all around and your mind constructs an apparently seamless presentation of the visual reality. In fact, most of your visual sense is nothing but an imaginative reconstruction from memory that your mind fits to the available clues that your eyes and other senses provide. So, to represent this complicated process with a Steadicam point of view, I use a technique of presenting one clearly defined visual idea after another, allowing the audience to construct their own sense of the overall visual reality from this series of ideas. I go through the space defined by a shot and imagine being the character, what he or she is concerned about, what he or she is feeling. I am in essence playing the role myself, using camera technique rather than acting technique, so I try very hard to get the actor to play the scene first, and ask questions about what I should be thinking, feeling and doing. The trick is to turn those ideas into specific shot making techniques.

Yes, but don’t you think that when you watch a movie, often the very smoothness of a Steadicam shot brings your attention to that fact that it was shot with a Steadicam?

Well, there are two answers:

First, before Steadicam, it used to be the convention that if you want to tell the audience ‘You are watching a subjective shot’, you do it hand-held, and the inertial unsteadiness, the shaking of the shot is what alerted the audience that this was supposed to be a point of view. I think it’s an overused and less convincing technique, but it is easy and it lends itself nicely to suggesting a spontaneous reaction to the scene, which is possible, but more difficult with a Steadicam. These days the audience is being trained to recognize another convention for point of view when they see a very smooth, very wide-angle shot that moves somewhat aimlessly through a set. I don’t like either convention very much.

Secondly, bad technique and execution will call attention to the process rather than the action, no matter how it is done. But if what you do is present the audience with a series of ideas, clearly executed, they don’t notice the crane, dolly, tripod, Steadicam or hand-held nature of the shot, they just see the ideas, and then it’s a good shot. I feel the Steadicam, handled well, is one of the most expressive and powerful tools you can use for this, but it is a two-sided sword and, handled badly, it can be one of the most offensive, crude and obvious tools we can use. That is always the challenge for me … walking that tightrope between sublime and subversive. I am always at the edge of completely subverting my intentions through the smallest failure of technique, physical condition, mental preparation and concentration, emotion or sometimes most significantly, political skills. That challenge is a large part of the attraction of the job for me.

I think it’s much harder to do a subjective shot well than anything else. Because what I want to do within a point of view is to express a series of purposeful, simple ideas; for instance, as part of a shot, I may want to portray a character who’s absolutely determined and absolutely clear about what he wants to do, and nothing is going to stop him – he wants to go through that door ahead of him, and confront something on the other side. He doesn’t care about anything else in the world, he just wants to go through that door and there may be no extraneous movements in the frame – nothing to grab the audience’s eye other than the set. To do this I need to place that door very deliberately and precisely in some part of the frame and it becomes my target: ideally, it never wavers from that part of the frame, it just gets bigger. Any little bumps distract from the idea of going to the door and they are very noticeable because anything but a steadily growing image of the door is new information, a new idea, and the audience will be startled by it, and they will notice the movement of the camera instead of the simple but powerful idea that the character is moving resolutely to the door. The more perfect your technique, the less you feel the Steadicam and the more you see the idea.

How do you organize and execute a long, unbroken shot?

One reason editing is nice is that it allows you do a section of the scene from a fixed position, or as a dolly or crane move, until it stops working for some reason. A new angle is established and the scene continues, perhaps with some unnecessary action cut out as well. If I am asked to do an unbroken Steadicam shot in the same situation, I have to figure out another solution. I may want to get to that same second angle, but without making the audience feel like they are just waiting for me to get there, or feeling that the camera is rushing to a new position for no apparent reason. As a general rule, I want the camera movements to seem expected, desired, even inevitable by the audience. I don’t want arbitrary movements, unnecessary movements of either the actors or myself that don’t contribute directly to the story. Often that means that I must manipulate the physical space. I might move parts of the set or people to create a different space where the actors can move logically and allow me to respond with the camera without calling attention to myself, as I would by moving in a direction or speed that might seem undesirable to the audience, and also to end up where I want to go.

This often introduces some new ideas into the scene, but to be helpful they have to be consistent with the story, they can’t seem arbitrary. So I must respect the needs of the actor, and the ideas of the director, and get help from anybody who can supply it. For instance, in Goodfellas⁹ I needed to tamper with the shot, I needed something for Ray Liotta, the main character to do, because otherwise he would just be walking through the club and the audience would just be waiting to get inside. I thought if we asked him to deal with other people along the way at strategic places where I needed help to keep the shot going – maybe he tips them or maybe he just talks to them – suddenly those events become the story, how he talks to these people, what he says to them. These technical challenges lead to solutions that enhance the drama. It’s magic when it works like that, but that’s what makes the difference between a long shot and a great shot.

Is it always necessary to shoot with the Steadicam or is it maybe possible to use other means?

I think that the best way to do anything is the simplest way, I mean the simplest looking way, not necessarily the simplest to execute. The simplest, whatever it is.

The Steadicam is capable of very complex things and sometimes there is nothing that can handle a complex shot as well. But if you are a good operator, it’s also capable of beautifully simple things. There is nothing more pure than the camera simply panning at a perfectly constant rate in a wide space or tracking sideways with perfect direction and smoothness – just those simple ideas, just pure movement through space. Now the Steadicam can do these things, but there are other instruments that also do them and often do them easier or better. But I don’t like to impose limits on myself without first attempting what initially seems too difficult, or at least unnecessarily difficult with a Steadicam, and I have done many shots that at first I didn’t think were appropriate for Steadicam. Sometimes you can get exactly the same shot two different ways – which is the more appropriate often depends upon the priorities of the moment. Sometimes it’s better to use a Steadicam because it’s faster, sometimes it’s better to use a Steadicam because the operator can make a more beautiful response to a little sudden change in the scene, sometimes it’s better to use a dolly because the Steadicam operator is tired.

When asked to do a shot that I knew would be fairly simple shot with a dolly, I have at times responded by asking ‘Why don’t you use a dolly?’ I might not get much more explanation than ‘I want you to do it’ or ‘Let’s just see how it goes …’. After operating Steadicam for about twenty years now, I’ve learned it can be worthwhile trying to stretch my abilities in attempting these shots. Earlier in my career I would have thought some things should only be attempted with a dolly – simple, beautiful moves without deviation, just perfect tracking, booming or panning moves. But I have learned that if everything is going well I can make those same moves – if I’m in very, very good form and if there’s no wind, and if I’m rested, and if the equipment is in perfect shape. I can make those moves, plus I can make adjustments during those moves just as a good operator and dolly grip might, but I can make the adjustments with one mind, whereas the dolly operator and grip are often making very subtle corrections for each other and what you see is a series of very small corrections. I can do the same thing but without the corrections, so those same little adjustments look more organic and human and they can sometimes even convey emotion. It is in the little subtleties that I find the most satisfaction and I might look for the opportunities to respond emotionally, almost intuitively to an actor. One example might be: I watch the actor’s eyes and some small change in them makes me want to look more closely to see what he is thinking. In my mind I think ‘what’s happening?’ and the response I make with the camera is almost nothing. And on the screen you see a little schh… sound that Larry made to synthesize the action of panning. It is a small but sudden movement, and it’s a deliberate but almost instinctive reaction by me. I’m responding as if we were linked together, like a breath, so my camera becomes like another person and the audience becomes connected through that person to the other actors. The audience becomes more empathetic, more involved. The actor cannot help but respond to my camera as well, and we become even more closely linked together, and hopefully, the audience feels like it is participating in the scene.

Larry McConkey, Steadicam operator and Director of Photography

Larry McConkey works as a Steadicam operator – specializing in ‘long takes’, e.g. Goodfellas, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes, Carlito’s Way and others – and also as Director of Photography for documentaries, music videos, commercials and one forthcoming film, White of the Eyes.

He teaches as a Steadicam Master in workshops all over the world.

Films

His films include: Birdy, A. Parker (1984); After Hours, M. Scorsese (1985); Legal Eagles, I. Reitman (1986); Mosquito Coast, P. Weir (1986); The Untouchables, B. De Palma (1987); Witches of Eastwick, G. Miller (1987); Casualties of War, B. DePalma (1989), GoodFellas, M. Scorsese (1990), The Bonfire of the Vanities, B. De Palma (1990); Miller’s Crossing, J. Coen (1990); The Silence of The Lambs, J. Demme (1991); At Play in the Fields of the Lord, H. Babenco (1991); Raising Cain, B. De Palma (1992); Carlito’s Way, B. De Palma (1993); The Age of Innocence, M. Scorsese (1993); Mission Impossible, B. De Palma (1996); Ransom, Ron Howard (1996); Snake Eyes, B. De Palma (1998); Celebrity, W. Allen (1998); Summer of Sam, S. Lee (1999); Bringing Out the Dead, M. Scorsese (1999); Three Kings, D. O’Russel (1999); Mission to Mars, B. De Palma (2000); and many others.

Interview with Nicola Pecorini, Volterra, November 1998

What do you think about the Steadicam?

My opinion of the Steadicam has a lot to do with how I discovered it with respect to what I was doing before, which is that I had worked in 16 mm for Switzerland’s Italian television for almost three years. I was part of a ‘film team’, which means that I had a 16 mm camera, then there was a sound man, a journalist and/or a director. We’d go around doing a little bit of everything, a soccer game or a documentary on spiders or an interview about elections in Germany, so I was used to always being frustrated with regard to camera movements, in the sense that I never got what I wanted, unless I could have done them by hand, on roller-skates. It was all a thing of trying hard but not getting very good results.

Then, while I was on vacation in America in 1981 I discovered the Steadicam. I did a course with Garrett and it was a revelation for me, because for the first time even by myself I could move the camera, I mean I could do ‘camera movements’.

The Steadicam is an incredible device that lets you move the camera where and how you want, and it has another enormous advantage, which is that the same person moves the camera and does the shot. I didn’t realize that right away, partly because what you need for doing documentary television is so different than what I later discovered you need when you’re making movies.

Figure 4.3 Nicola Pecorini and Vittorio Storaro on the set of Ladyhawke, Cinecittà, Italy, 1983. The operator is working with a Steadicam Model II, modified. Photo courtesy Nicola Pecorini collection

But above all, working more and more on movies, and more and more at a high level, I realized that one of the incredible advantages that the Steadicam offered was the fact of deciding when to start the movement, when to finish it, where to finish it, where to begin it, to adjust things if the shot’s not working, to adjust to the unexpected that can happen in normal life. In my opinion, this is the most incredible thing about the Steadicam. Actually, if you look at the last 50 years, it may be the greatest innovation ever introduced in how movies are made, especially in how movies on location are made.

In 1922 there were dollies which were absolutely comparable with the dollies we have today, in other words, the ‘technicality’ of making movies was already extremely advanced. It was halted when the sound cameras came out, because instead of moving a thing 60-cm long, you now had to move something that weighed 2 tons and measured 2.5 m by 3.15 m, which was impossible, so technically there was a return to 40 years before. Cinema was blocked, and the Steadicam made great mobility possible again, especially if you think that the Steadicam came out in 1976, so all those things that are available today, minidolly, minigib, all those things didn’t exist. You either got on a normal dolly, on a crane, or basically you didn’t move the camera.

I should also say that the introduction of the Steadicam was a good thing not only with regard to the possibilities for using it – in other words, the kind of shot that it lets you do – but also technologically. For example, all these things like radiofocus or remote focus, remote control, video transmission, all this technology that was developed above all to be used with the Steadicam, is now being used in lots of other ways. Now, for example, it happens really often that the assistant doesn’t get up on the dolly arm anymore to do the remote focus, which also makes things a lot simpler and quicker, and the grips don’t have to work so hard. In other words, life is simpler and more complete. If there weren’t the Steadicam, everyone would still be there with those wires, and all that stuff.

So for me that’s what the Steadicam is, and for me the Steadicam adventure, which is over now, was a great thing, because due to various circumstances I was there at the beginning, so you feel this thing of being a ‘pioneer’, which is really great.

Then, well, personally I’ve gotten a little tired of it, partly because I always had a sort of disenchanted view of the Steadicam. I mean, it was a tool like any other. Gradually, as I found other tools for moving the camera I realized that it’s like how I was at the beginning, jumping around and bothering everyone I was working with saying ‘Let’s do it in Steadicam, let’s do it in Steadicam!’, and then you could do it with the normal dolly, there wasn’t a real reason for it. There’s this way of thinking that the Steadicam is everything, that you can’t do anything without the Steadicam, and in the end you tend to take everything to extremes and lose sight of what the film’s needs are as a film in general, and to consider your contribution to the movie more important than it is.

In fact, this thing happens a lot. For example, when I went to America, I had a different approach to the Steadicam, which was ‘We need to do this, okay, 10 minutes, ready’, which is very rare as I found out later, because the others tend to say ‘Oh, we have to construct it, it’ll take two days’, a rehearsal here, a rehearsal there, etc., etc. It gets too exaggerated for the customer because he says ‘Okay, if the Steadicam makes things more complicated instead of simplifying them, I might as well just use traditional tools’.

I remember that at the beginning of my Steadicam adventure (I’m talking about the early 1980s when there were really only a few of us using it and I was one of the few who could make a movie from A to Z), there was a certain – not envy, but my American colleagues would call me every once in a while and say ‘You know, I’d like to make a movie from A to Z, how do you do it?’. First of all, you don’t drive a hard bargain, because one of the reasons that they would drive a hard bargain is very simply because if you do that you can ask to be paid more, which means that if you ask for US$2000 a day to do the Steadicam work, obviously they won’t have you doing the whole movie because it’s not worth it. It becomes something which has to be planned months in advance and if something unexpected happens and they have to change the shooting script one day, which happens all the time when you’re making a movie, you’re not available and they have to call someone else, and in the end it’s frustrating because you can’t even say ‘I did that movie’ because it’s not true. You contributed slightly to the movie, but there are movies that – at the beginning they didn’t even put your name on, but when they started to put the name of the Steadicam operator, there would be seven names,¹⁰ and you’d say ‘Who did that? Who did that shot? Me, no, him, I don’t know!’.

I mean, it becomes a purely mercenary relationship that, in my opinion, is counterproductive for the artisan who’s doing it, for the mercenary who’s doing it. I don’t know how you want to define it, but I’ve always disagreed a lot with this kind of system, with the result that I made a lot less money than they did. But I have to say that I haven’t regretted it, because I think it’s let me do a lot more interesting things than they have, and it’s let me stay with a lot of movies from the beginning to the end, which I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Larry, for example, made the choice of doing only, exclusively, Steadicam, he doesn’t even do B camera when he’s on the set, whereas I find that I like to begin a movie, work on it, and finish it, so in the end I’ve found myself doing everything, A camera and, when it was needed, the Steadicam.

Do you think there’s an abuse of the Steadicam, owing to its capacity for movement, and because it can make shooting times quicker?

Yes, often. It’s a little bit in movies like it is everywhere but, for example, when the zoom came out it was absolutely abused, when the Tecnocrane came out, it was abused. I mean, there was a bit of masturbatory use of the tool with the Steadicam too and obviously we Steadicam operators were partly responsible for that, because at the beginning you’re so enthusiastic, you think you can do incredible things and in the end you do things which don’t have that much sense. I think that in the end, as I said before, it’s still just a shot, by which I mean that it has to have a logic, a purpose, be useful to the story. If it has that, okay, it can be Steadicam, you can throw it off the balcony, you can do what you want, you can leave it fixed where it is. If it’s only an exercise in style then in my opinion it doesn’t have much sense. It’s true, Kubrick used it for an exercise in style in The Shining, it was exactly at the level of an exercise in style, but he’s Kubrick, and at any rate in the end he makes masterpieces, even if flawed. But yes, I’ve done a lot of stupid things, really lots of them, and just as many times I’ve refused to do them. There is an abuse of the tool that however at the beginning was pretty justified, because Garrett’s invention was so clever, for example, the fact that you can boom up and down and you can change the height. Now with the new model it stays where you put it, first you had to hold it; it has a 90° radius. That’s an incredible freedom that the Steadicam has compared with any other tool, because the speed with which you can do it is incredible.

Back at the beginning when all its possibilities were being discovered, obviously there was an awful lot of experimentation. Then, in my opinion, that went on a little too long, because in the end those are the possible variations, you can’t do God knows what. It took a few years; I’d say that the Steadicam experimentation went on until 1983–1984, after which they kept on doing more or less everything but they didn’t invent anything new. Until 1985 they were doing good experiments both with its use and its applications. For example, in 1987 you could rent Steadicams in Italy. Before that, it was a disaster if you broke a Steadicam, you had to beat your head against the wall. Still, I think that the period from 1981 to 1984 was the best period, and the most fun, because we were discovering a new world of our own, and we did a lot of silly things that I don’t regret.

Do you think the Steadicam is capable of influencing the style of a movie, compared with a normal camera?

No, I don’t think so, it’s like saying, do the C major chord cadences oblige you to do a certain thing? No, with the C major chords you can do whatever you want. I mean to say, for me the Steadicam is like a saxophone instead of a violin, in the end you can play the same thing. They have a different sound, but in the end the music can be the same.

But does the Steadicam force you to use it in a certain way?

No, there are clichéd ways of using the Steadicam, it’s true, but not for me. For me that’s impossible, because I can use the Steadicam in fifty different ways. I mean, now, as Director of Photography, I always want it on the truck and lots of times I use it just because it makes things easier. For example, I have to be free to move with the dolly but the pavement isn’t one of the best. I mount the Steadicam arm on the dolly and I can go without any problems. I can shoot everything I want, even if there’s a dislevel, I skip it, if there’s a wire I skip it, nothing’s a problem. That’s not a Steadicam use, do you see what I mean? But I also know that if I mount the Steadicam on the dolly, if it doesn’t go to the mark, or if the operator doesn’t push the dolly to the mark, hop! I’ve gone to the mark, hop! I’ve bent down a little bit more or a little bit less. It gives me that option, too. Still, I find that for example, since I don’t like to operate the camera if I’m doing the photography because they are two different jobs that pile up, and if I’m not the one doing it, or someone that I trust absolutely, I’d rather not do it. I find that the Steadicam, despite everything, still has that big handicap, which at times is an advantage, which is that you have to have a handle on it. It’s useless to ask for a guitar solo if you don’t have a guitar player.

And what about television use/abuse of the Steadicam?

Well, I have to say that I enjoyed doing things for television, since I happened to be there at the right time, and I got a lot of satisfaction from the viewpoint of curiosity about applications. In Italy I worked on a New Year’s show on Channel 5,¹¹ in 1982, with Raimondo Vianello and Sandra Mondaini. Davide Rampello was the Director and there, too, we did some very interesting things in Steadicam, especially because they were new things, strange things. However, because they worked there, they became clichés, like ‘we can go around the singer with the microphone’. It’s okay if you do it once, but when you’ve done it four times, it’s already boring. The intelligence of the user, in my opinion, isn’t the cliché. I mean, someone who lives off clichés will find clichés in any thing he does; it’s not the Steadicam, it’s not the tool.

So it doesn’t condition you in the sense of choosing the shot, but what’s important is how you use it?

Exactly. Every once in a while it can be the only choice. For example, it’s happened to me to run over suspension bridges made of ropes,¹² and that was the only way to get the shot.

What was the first time you used the Steadicam in an important way?

The first time I used it was in Ladyhawke¹³ with Vittorio Storaro, in the fall of 1983. If I’m not wrong, Garrett got me that job, actually, because Vittorio had called Garrett with whom he had made One from the Heart the year before, which was all in Steadicam. Garrett couldn’t do it, and he gave Vittorio my name.

It’s a movie in which you don’t notice the Steadicam.

No, I don’t want the Steadicam to be noticed.

What do you think about how the Steadicam is used in America, Italy, or Europe in general?

No, it depends on the person, I don’t think you can generalize, and anyway usually it’s a question of budget, in my opinion.

Is its use more widespread in America?

No, not necessarily more widespread. I wouldn’t know what percentage of productions or how many productions use it, but I think it’s about the same. The fact is that in America, as I was saying, partly because of the politics of these ‘semi-fanatics’, the Steadicam costs a lot, so it gets used on a day-to-day basis. In Europe, where even if you use the Steadicam you get paid peanuts, as far as I can see there’s a more generalized use of the B camera/Steadicam than in America. Even if it’s true that in America it’s easy to find a B camera operator who also does Steadicam, or an A camera operator who does Steadicam.

Is there a difference, I mean at the visual level, in how you can control the camera and the shot because you’re looking at a monitor?

I’ve realized that having got so used to the Steadicam, I find it easier to work with other devices as well, like hot heads, in which you have to look at a monitor instead of through a camera eyepiece.

You can control everything.

It’s easier, you do fewer stupid things, you make fewer mistakes.

It’s a different way of looking.

Absolutely. For me the really big handicap with the Steadicam, which is still there, and I got a little bit upset with Garrett because he listens to those ‘fanatics’ who are sort of like those bicycle riders who have a bicycle that weighs 1.237 kg, but then they wear a watch that weighs 340 g. If you take all the weight away, then why do you wear a Rolex? I mean, it’s not logical. And lots and lots of these Americans are like this, I mean, the thing made of titanium, or of magnesium – and I kept saying, ‘Garrett, when you make the new model, the master, I want a PC-type screen, as big as this, that’s the only thing I’m asking you for, I want to see the detail’, because I can’t keep having to guess what’s there, who was there, in view, not in view. You can’t tell, because it’s too small.

But if it’s too big it’s awkward?

But just something as big as this! A mattebox or a sunshade is like this! I mean, if it’s down there, parallel with the sunshade, if the sunshade can go, so can it. Then if one day you need to have it really narrow, you put on the little monitor, but generally speaking I want the big monitor. That’s always been a big handicap with the Steadicam, because you can’t see the details and you don’t know how many times you have to be someplace and then the door opens – what do I know about what happened, and who can tell? It was in frame but I really can’t see whether it opened or not.

And tiring situations, in the sense of resistance?

Not a problem.

Shooting when it’s hot or cold?

The cold is dangerous, mostly because you get sick – even if it’s cold you sweat when you’ve got the camera on, then you take it off and the sweat becomes icy.

If you have to do a sequence over and over, do you have the same control that you have with other cameras?

It depends on the shot.

On how tiring it is?

Well, if it’s physically hard and takes a long time, then yes, of course, you undoubtedly become less clear-minded.

In this sense, how does the Steadicam compare with other cameras?

You know, in my experience, which has basically been above all with good actors, the first takes are good. The problem is that a great many Steadicam operators flub the first takes, then they start to get tired and they can’t get them right anymore. At any rate, believe me, it’s hard work! Once, when I was filming the 1987 World Championships of Athletics, I made the official movie for CONI.¹⁴ After shooting they tested us with the Steadicam on to see our anaerobic response, things like recovery times after physical effort. They told me that it’s like being a 100 m sprinter, in the sense that you can do it over and over but in the space of a day it becomes a big effort.

How do you prefer to use the Steadicam, do you like using it for a long take uncut, or do you prefer short pan shots?

It depends. It’s nice to do long takes every so often, but as I said before they have to have a reason for being there. If they don’t, I couldn’t care less about them. I remember once some French people asked me to do a long take that made no sense at all, and in the end it couldn’t be done. Why should you do it if there’s no sense to it?

Do you prefer to work over and over with the same director or director of photography?

No. I mean, there are people you like to work with more and that you get along with, but something for which I’ve always been grateful to the Steadicam is that having found myself in a situation in which for a certain number of years I was either the only Steadicam operator, or the only one who could be trusted, or one of the few who could be trusted in Italy and in Europe in general, I ended up working with tons of people – something that would have been impossible otherwise in the ‘normal’ professional scene in Italy, because in Italy there’s a very ‘mafia’-type system for awarding jobs. There’s an unspoken rule which exists in photography and also for grips, electricians, make-up artists, everyone who works in movies, that if you’re not someone’s relative you don’t work in movies. No one in my family worked in movies, so the only way I had to get work was the Steadicam. Not only that, but especially in the area of photography, the blackmailing power that sometimes even the directors of photography have is so big that if you don’t join their retinue (‘court’) from the lowest possible rung of the ladder and move up rung by rung, then usually you don’t move up those rungs at all. Luckily I avoided all those rungs because I was always in touch with everyone and worked with everyone. Practically the only one I’ve never worked with is Luciano Tovoli, but I’ve worked with everyone else. That way you learn, you learn a lot more, even from the ones who don’t know what they’re doing – actually, maybe you learn more from the ones who don’t know what they’re doing than from the ones who do. So the question isn’t if there are, or have been, people – directors and directors of photography – that I got along with better than others and that it was a pleasure to work with again. There are others with whom I kept working and I didn’t really know why I kept working with those assholes, but you know, that’s work, too – after all, you don’t have to marry them.

The Steadicam is so versatile, you can do so many things with it, that the person asking you to do something must trust you a lot and understand what you’re doing.

Yes, but I think it’s a lot at the level of helping, making a film better or worse. The kind of involvement, understanding, communication that you can establish with a director of photography as a Steadicam operator can be just as important as the kind of understanding, involvement or whatever that the grip has with him, or that an actor has with him. I mean, when that alchemy snaps into place it’s very important, but it’s not specifically something having to do with being a Steadicam operator. It’s very important in every field and with all professional people: if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen, and it’s a problem. I’ve always been firmly convinced of something, and I’ve never changed my mind about it: you can have the greatest screenplay in the world, the greatest cast and troupe in the world, on paper, but if there isn’t harmony on the set you’ll get a shitty movie. If, on the other hand, you have a screenplay that’s not all that great, but there’s harmony, it could even become a good movie, because something happens that in the end you can feel, you can see. There’s something extra, there’s the fun, the research, the curiosity, something that develops mentally. Yes, that’s what it is, I think.

However, first you asked me about fatigue. I always thought of the Steadicam as mental exercise more than physical exercise, so like with all mental exercise, yes, it’s tiring, but when you solve your mental crossword puzzle, your ideas, your mental journey, at the end you don’t even feel the fatigue anymore, because you got where you wanted to go. Yes, physically there were times when you worked really hard, like going up and down stairs. I remember once I did a film for television with Salvatore Nocita and Annie Girardot, and there was a scene in which she got up and went running after her son. There were something like four flights of stairs to do on foot. We did about fourteen takes, more or less, that’s like fifty-two stories, running. That evening I remember my legs hurt, but the next day it was just like having been skiing and the snow was icy and your legs hurt.

Now that you’re a director of photography, do you find that there are particular technical difficulties in doing the lighting for a Steadicam sequence?

Well, the Steadicam is more problematical, and Peppino if he was honest will have told you about that very well. That’s the reason he doesn’t like the Steadicam. It’s more problematical where you move around more, because then you see more, and you never know where to hide the lights. Basically, though, the problems are the same. In this sense as well it’s not different from other devices.

It can be controlled?

Yes, as I said. If you do a long tracking with a normal dolly you’re sure to have the same problems.

The thing is that one of the advantages of the Steadicam is that you can move in curved lines, which you can’t do with other devices. It becomes one of the disadvantages, as well, since you use more of the set so you have to prepare more of the set. For me it’s easy, because I grew up with the Steadicam, and having already had to deal with so many of those problems I know what they are and what I have to do.

It’s not that I choose not to use the Steadicam because it makes problems for me, if it’s useful I use it, and if not I don’t.

What do you think about the fact that there are people who become Steadicam operators without having had any training as camera operators?

Too many.

In other words, the fact that they don’t have the sense of the shot that you get from having been a camera operator?

Yes, and then in my opinion the real disadvantage, more than that, because after all you can have that sense naturally and you’ll be okay, is that it comes from an idea of the job of Steadicam operator that I think is wrong, where they take it as a shortcut, where they’re lacking the basic information that is fundamental for becoming an operator. Also, they have this idea, I call it the ‘gymnastics vision of the Steadicam’. Meaning, being able to jump from a wall 1.2 m high instead of 1.05 m, which yes, can be useful, but it doesn’t change absolutely anything, because you can make the wall whatever height it needs to be so you can jump down from it. That’s not the point. I mean, the grips are there on purpose for that. It’s really a bad thing.

But it’s something that’s becoming more widespread?

Yes, too much.

What about coming from television, where there’s another kind of experience?

Yes, but that’s still okay. When I ran the Steadicam courses here in Italy, sometimes we’d take these people without experience to fill the courses and pay our expenses, but not very often, because usually we had too many applicants for the places we had, and we tried to avoid them all together. On the admittance form we asked how many years of experience people had, and we gave precedence to people with more years of experience, of course, because I’ve always seen it as a specialization, not as something unto itself, so I need you to be a camera operator, and if you’re not a camera operator I don’t want you.

Is there a time you used the Steadicam that you particularly remember?

Bertolucci has used it a lot. He was very opposed to it at the beginning, but then he had to use it in The Last Emperor. The first time he used it was in that movie. The entire sequence of the boy at the coronation was done with the Steadicam for two basic reasons. One was that the Chinese don’t take anything ‘into that room’ so we couldn’t take any other equipment in, and the other is that you never knew what the little boy was going to do. In the scene when he’s looking for the cricket, he was five years old, and for him it was really just a game to look for the cricket, and every time it came out differently. You couldn’t lay down tracks, it would have taken too long, so that’s why the Steadicam was used.

What’s changed now that you’re director of photography?

Well, I liked being a cameraman a lot, because every time I worked I learned something. Then you get to a certain level where you don’t do anything that exciting anymore, you don’t learn all that much anymore. You find yourself solving other people’s problems. Excuse me, but at that point I’ll be better off making my own problems.

Nicola Pecorini, Director of Photography and Steadicam operator

From 1978 to 1980 Nicola Pecorini worked for Swiss Television. He became a Steadicam operator in 1980. With Garrett Brown, he founded the SOA in 1988 and organized and taught at Steadicam Workshops in Italy and the USA.

He worked as camera operator and Steadicam operator on many important Italian and American movies, such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and Oliver Stone’s The Doors. In recent years he has been Director of Photography on a number of films, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Rhinoceros Hunting in Budapest.

Films

Pecorini’s films include: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, T. Gilliam (1998); The Brave, J. Depp (1997); Rhinoceros Hunting in Budapest, M. Haussmann (1996); American President, R. Reiner (1995); Little Buddha, B. Bertolucci (1993); Cliffhanger, R. Harlin (1992); Bitter Moon, R. Polanski (1992); The Sheltering Sky, B. Bertolucci (1990), The Doors, O. Stone (1990); The Last Emperor, B. Bertolucci, (1987); Rent a Cop, J. London (1987); Isthar, E. May (1986); Ladyhawke, R. Donner (1984); Aerosmith ‘A hole in my soul’ (video-clip) A. Morahin (1987); Springsteen ‘Born in the USA Tour’ (live music) A. Rosato (1985); Simon and Garfunkel Reunion Tour (live music) R. Cohen (1983). Also, more than sixty other feature films plus TV movies, TV shows, live music, music videos, commercials, industrials, reportages, documentaries, news.

Interview with Haskell Wexler (by telephone), March 1999

What do you think about the visual potential of the Steadicam?

The visual potential of the Steadicam is almost continuously to bediscovered because potential means, at least in English, possibilities and the possibilities are only restrained by the ability of the Steadicam operator.

Figure 4.4 Garrett Brown with DP Haskell Wexler (first to use Steadicam) on the set of Bound for Glory in 1975. Garrett holds Cinema Products’ first ‘sled’ prototype. Photo courtesy Garrett Brown collection

In your opinion, what is the Steadicam best used for?

The Steadicam is a tool to move the camera, we have many tools to move the camera, many complex and useful tools to move the camera, now even more than when the Steadicam was invented, though the Steadicam is best used in situations where other ways to move the camera are not practical or possible.

When did you first see the Steadicam used?

I am a friend of Garrett Brown; when he was inventing the Steadicam I saw him. There was a ‘Keds’ tennis shoes commercial where the shot involved moving fast over the ground following rock-and-roll kids in tennis shoes running at an airport. Garrett used his first Steadicam in that commercial.

What type of situation in a movie would make you choose the Steadicam?

When do you decide to use it during a film?

For example, if you have a camera-car shot and the road is very rough, it’s possible to mount a Steadicam on the camera-car and you erase or minimize the roughness of the road. Now of course there are other tools that also do that. There are gyroscopic helicopter mounts which also fit on the camera-car that can do it, but the Steadicam is easier and simpler and faster for that situation. And now Steadicam is also used very often in what we call a combination shot, that’s a shot where the camera begins on some other camera-moving device which extends the up and down range of the camera, because the Steadicam has a limited range from low to high and high to low. By combining it with a crane or some other device, you are able to get spectacular shots.

What kind of a relationship do you have with the Steadicam operator?

Basically your relationship to the Steadicam operator should be the same as you have with the operator when a camera is on a dolly. Usually I lay out the shot with a special finder, I put the lens up near the Steadicam, and the finder has a colour radio transmitter that, in a rehearsal, shows on a video monitor what I would like the camera to do. Usually we take that rehearsal Steadicam shot without using the Steadicam because the operator has a long complicated job, there’s a physical drain on him. Then the operator watches the monitor and sees what happened, makes some alterations, sometimes for practical reasons, verifies it in rehearsal with the assistant controlling the focus by radio and then they go ahead.

Have you tried using the Steadicam yourself?

Yes, I tried many times.

You’ve put it on?

Yes, I’ve got to mention that when I spoke of the Steadicam previously in this series of questions, many of the times the Steadicam is not on the body. Of course in the combination shots the Steadicam would be on the body. But dollies and cranes extend the range of the Steadicam and it’s possible to hard mount the Steadicam, as in the example I gave earlier of the Steadicam on a camera-car on a rough road – the Steadicam would not be on the body mount, it would be hard mounted on a camera-car.

How do you plan the lighting for Steadicam shots?

It’s the same. Very often Steadicam shots are regular shooting so you plan the shot as you would normally plan it. The Steadicam is another way to move the camera.

Does the fact that you can move around with the Steadicam and focus in a lot of directions make it different from using a crane or other things?

No, you have to understand that when you lay out the shot with the Steadicam you can actually use the Steadicam itself and you can stand right there with the Steadicam operator during the rehearsal, look through the monitor, record it, so there aren’t any questions about it. The only thing that I usually do in the lighting for Steadicam shots is to be doubly careful that no light hits the lens, because it’s not possible for the grips to easily see the Steadicam throughout the shot. The contemporary dollies and cranes can move and do move in any direction, there’s the Technocrane for example, there’s a telescoping crane and the overhead crane when the track is overhead, and they do pretty much what a Steadicam will do, only it too often takes more trouble to do it. I make pictures and things like that where the camera is very big and heavy, and also, most camera operators, including myself, prefer to do shots where you can literally look through the camera because we can easily see and quickly focus on things. The Steadicam was made possible by separating the eye from the camera, when the eye has to be on the camera but the nature of a person walking or moving, the body movement, gets transmitted to the camera. What really primed the camera for these crane shots I’m talking about is the Steadicam, the ability you have to transmit the camera image remotely, and that’s a key philosophy that came along with the video assist.

How do you feel about shooting with a hand-held camera?

Well, being hand-held is another way to move the camera so, when it’s appropriate, it’s good. Often in a documentary-type situation where there’s more chaos than is normal on a feature film, hand-holding can give a different image, a different feeling, than the Steadicam. The Steadicam’s virtue can also be detrimental: if someone wants to transmit a certain idea of emergency or unsmoothness, roughness.

What do you think about the use of the Steadicam in documentaries?

In some documentaries, yes. For example, in video and so forth, absolutely. When you shoot rock events where the operator has to be perhaps on the stage or move around the band and not get the audience in the frame, and for an intimate picture. Also for certain documentaries that are in plain video, when you want minimum equipment, the Steadicam can be useful.

What do you think about point of view shots and the fact that now they are often shot with the Steadicam?

Well, point of view means the camera has to represent the point of view. That means if you have a person who is sitting in a wheelchair and going down a hallway and you want that person’s point of view, the movement of the camera, the height of the camera would be usually the eye-height of the person. If they are going through a crowd of people and are looking for another person, then the point of view would be more like the head, and the eyes will move left, right, up, down and so forth, whatever the meaning of the scene is. So it becomes a question not so much of what device you use as what mood you want to give as a point of view of the character in the film.

Is it possible to foresee the effect that the use of the Steadicam will have on a particular shot or is it too ‘free’ for you to imagine the result beforehand?

Well there’s a video transmitter on the Steadicam, so any judgement you want to make you can make by looking at video in rehearsal, of course, and you try to foresee the effects of this shot, like any shot. Again, I go back to my original statement, it is a special tool to move the camera, and everything else is not done by a magic wand.

Yes, but when you make a hand-held camera shot you usually do it by yourself because it’s especially difficult to explain to somebody else what you want with the hand-held camera, and I think maybe it’s the same with the Steadicam?

It is quite the same, also, even if somebody can do what you want it’s not so easy to foresee what you want on the screen. I’ll give you an example. We have a scene of a woman who comes in a door and she walks by a man and she sits down in a chair for a moment, then she gets up from the chair and walks down a little hallway and enters the bathroom. Okay. I am the director of photography. I have the video finder, I have also the Steadicam, but I have the video finder in which I have the various lenses that are going to be used for filming. I stand outside the door and she comes toward me. I back up, I pan, tilt, then I keep on as she goes from the chair, walks down the hall and goes in the bathroom. Okay, what I just did is a colour video picture. I stand with the operator and we talk and he says ‘Look, maybe I should start outside the first door and not bring her in’. Then I say ‘Well, that would cut with the previous thing’ or maybe I’ll say ‘It’s a good idea’. So then we would do the shoot, we’d do what we saw on the monitor. In other words, if you are making a documentary or you are making something where you are not in control of what is in front of the camera, then of course you are obliged to rely on the general intelligence, the filmmaking intelligence of the operator.

How do you feel about technological research in filmmaking and the innovations it has made available? Do you think that technologically advanced products tend to increase or decrease creativity in filmmaking?

I’ll say categorically that technology neither increases nor decreases creativity in filmmaking. Creativity does not spring from technology, technology can free a certain creativity, but it’s not ipso facto something to do seriously with creativity.

Do you think that the use of the Steadicam has meant the creation of a recognizable style, with negative effects?

No, I think in general if you recognize a shot as a Steadicam shot it’s not a good shot. In other words, to answer your question, I do not if it’s used properly. Now if it’s floppy, of course, it would have a negative effect so that again, it’s what image you want to project on the screen.

Have you found that sometimes the Steadicam is used for convenience and not for artistic reasons or because it’s needed to achieve the desired effects?

I think you mean that sometimes people get sloppy and they say okay, let’s just chase somebody, chase them all around, go here, go there, just get it done. Convenience usually means for budget reasons or for time reasons and not for the best reasons for the film. I assume that’s what would be meant by convenience. Well, when you make a film, any kind of film, everything is supposed to be done to direct the person’s eye, their interest, to the proper aspect of the drama. That’s the duty of the director of photography: it’s to make the eyes go where I want them to go. And so when you’re making a movie it’s not like you’re following a football game and say ‘Just go bring the camera on and be creative’; or like giving a person a palette and brushes and saying ‘You’re a painter’. That’s not art, and that’s not good movie making. So in answer to the question, I’ll just say yes.

Could you can tell me something about the film Bound for Glory as the first use of the Steadicam?

At that time, I’d done the commercial with Garrett and in Bound for Glory I wanted the shot that shows the whole camp and then to go down in the camp and see the people, see their faces, hear them talking; and when we saw it (at that time we did not have video transmission so nobody except Garrett saw the film until it was on the screen) it was so exciting, the fact that a camera could move like that. Everybody in the screening room watching the dailies just gasped and they gasped for a few years afterwards. Now it’s almost like a cliché, a cliché camera movement, because it’s very common. It’s a special tool with many, many possibilities but it is not a sacred tool – it’s a marvellous artistic device to have in your equipment, but it’s a tool.

When you do a very long shot, that runs maybe 5 minutes, where the Steadicam goes down corridors and stairs and through an open door and so on, are there particular difficulties or is it about the same as using a crane or something else?

No. The particular shot you’re talking about would be just like one that actually Garrett and I did in Las Vegas, up and down, different floors, stairways. Basically what you have to do is go with the Steadicam operator and the actors and play it out, and then you have to have some respect for the Steadicam operator’s body so that you don’t have him wear the suit and the camera for take after take. Also it’s important for him to see any obstacles that might trip him up. He assumes that usually they are there and faces to the side so he sees to focus, but he has to know where his feet are going all the time. So really in a shot like that, it mostly takes the skill and practice of the operator. The device itself, if properly balanced, will work fine. In general, what you should know is that most directors of photography will prefer to do shots where you can look through the camera.

Yes, and not with the distance.

Yes. We like to look through the camera, but when we have a shot where you need to use the video then the Steadicam is one of the most useful tools to move the camera. It’s as simple as that.

Haskell Wexler, Director of Photography, Director, Producer.

After many years making educational and industrial films, Haskell Wexler moved into feature films in 1959, when he was the cameraman for the famous semi-documentary film The Savage Eye. He became increasingly appreciated for his camerawork, winning an Academy Award for the black-and-white cinematography of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966.

In 1965, he co-produced and photographed The Loved One. In the same year he produced, directed, wrote and photographed The Bus, a documentary about a group of civil rights protesters travelling from San Francisco to Washington. In 1969 he made Medium Cool, which was set at the 1968 Democratic convention and dealt with the problem of violence in modern-day America. This movie, which received much critical acclaim, was directed, written, photographed and co-produced by Wexler.

Later, he collaborated in directing several political documentaries, while continuing to work on major feature productions as a cinematographer. In more recent years he has worked on many period and social consciousness films, including Matewan (1987).

He won an Oscar for the cinematography of Bound for Glory. Two of his many documentaries won Best Documentary Oscars, The Living City (1953) and Interviews with my Last Veterans (1970).

Films

Among his films (as cinematographer and director) are: The Savage Eye, B. Maddow, (1959); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, M. Nichols (1966); The Thomas Crown Affair, N. Jewison (1968); Medium Cool, H. Wexler (1969); One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, M. Forman (1975); Bound for Glory, H. Ashby (1976); The Man Who Loved the Woman, B. Edwards (1983); Latino, H. Wexler (1985); Matewan, J. Sayles (1987); Colors, D. Hopper (1988); Three Fugitives, F. Veber (1989); Blaze, R. Shelton (1989); The Babe, A. Hiller (1992); The Rich Man’s Wife, A. Holden Jones (1996); Bus Rider’s Union, H. Wexler (1999); Limbo, J. Sayles (1999); and many others.

His non-fiction films include An Interview with President Allende (1971); The CIA Case Officer (1978); Target Nicaragua: Inside a Secret War (1983).

Interview with Ed DiGiulio, Los Angeles, March 1999

I started Cinema Products in 1968, 30 years ago or so. I sold the company 10 years ago to a group of high-level industry-type people, but I continue in my role as the creative engineering force to develop new products and bring us into other areas.

Garrett came to me in 1974. He had originally gone to Panavision, because it was a very well-established company at that time and my company had only been in existence for 4 or 5 years. But the founder and President of Panavision, Bob Gottschalk, was a very paranoid individual, and he suffered from what we call the NIH factor. NIH stands for ‘not invented here’. Bob Gottschalk was a firm believer that if something was not invented inside Panavision it was not good. And Garrett Brown, before he revealed his idea to anybody, understandably had them sign a non-disclosure agreement form, but Gottschalk didn’t want to do it.

At the same time, Garrett was slowly running out of money because he had invested a lot in developing his prototype, and someone suggested that he gave me a call, which he did. He asked me if I would be interested and I said ‘Yeah’. He asked if I would sign a confidential disclosure agreement. I said ‘I have no problem with that’ because we are not thinking of doing anything in this area. So he came out, and he showed me the film first – I didn’t have to sign a non-disclosure to see the film – and when I saw what I saw on the film I said ‘Great! let me sign!’.

Then he opened up his sack and he had this pile of junk: I mean it was what you would expect from an inventor – to put thingstogether as expeditiously as possible. So at that point we made an agreement. That was in 1974 and from that point it took a year and a half and about three-quarters of a million dollars. It took a lot of work – we had to develop the video, the monitor and the arm. My brother designed the final arm and shares credit as co-inventor with Garrett.

Figure 4.5 Ed DiGiulio with the author during the interview at Cinema Products, Los Angeles, March 1999. Photo author’s own, taken by Francesco Ferrara

When we signed the agreement, we said that we would mutually agree on the name for the product. Garrett’s idea was the Brown stabilizer and I came up with the name Steadicam. Well, Garrett said to me ‘Ed that is a stupid, hokey name’. I said to Garrett ‘You know, you are absolutely right, Garrett, it is a corny, hokey name, but the beautiful thing about it is that it says what it is, totally unambiguously. So he is a great person and he agreed, you know, extra commissions (laughter), some special contracts or something, but he finally agreed and now as he looks back he says I did right, because it’s a good name. That’s one of the amusing early things that we did.

What is your opinion of the Steadicam?

Well, I have observed that it has provided the industry with a totally new means of artistic or creative expression. It was totally impossible to do before Steadicam and, in fact just the other night at the Academy Awards, there were two Steadicam operators with their cameras and in the old days you wouldn’t have had that. I know because I’ve been going to these things long enough – 10 years ago you would have had the big studio camera on a Vinton dolly with two guys pushing cable. They were moving around the stage, here you have two guys going up and down the stairs, going around and behind the stage, and the director was cutting and switching cameras. You never saw the Steadicam, but these two operators replaced all of the dolly movement, and even a lot of times they would just be standing with their static Steadicams acting like tripods, and good ones.

So that’s what I think it is then for the industry, and I just described to you how I first got involved, and it was lucky for me that Mr Gottschalk at Panavision was paranoid.

Can you tell us about working with Garrett Brown on improvements to the Steadicam over the years?

Well, I’ve worked closely with Garrett over the years and he continues to be what he always was from the beginning, a very creative and talented individual. We also benefited from the fact that Garrett went on to become the premier operator of the Steadicam, and really the best way to improve a product like that is to work with it yourself and then you know what shot is coming out. Garrett, for example, came back in the early 1980s and we produced the Model III. The Steadicam Model III was based totally on Garrett’s ideas.

What were the major changes in the evolution of the Steadicam?

We started out with the mistaken notion that the camera should be an integral part of the Steadicam. The first units that we made had a camera built in, so it was a dedicated system. We realized very quickly, within the year, that what we really needed was a model that would handle any camera, so that’s why we came out with the first unit, the Universal Model One, which was just a platform. The sled was a platform on which you put any camera and, in the Model One, the monitor was part of the base. Then we realized that was not a good idea because it wasn’t always conveniently visible, so we came out with the model Universal Two, where the monitor was able to move up and articulate on the centre post. And then, the next major change, as I mentioned before, was the Mark Three, which enjoyed 10 or 12 years of good life as a product, and that took us to the 1980s. Of course the major change now is the Master series, which came out in the early 1990s, and we’ve had great success with that. Hopefully we’re going to improve upon that with some new ideas that Garrett has contributed.

How do you feel about shooting with the hand-held camera?

Serena, you have to do one thing for me, look at that aluminium roof and turn your head like that, does it move?

No, it stays still.

It stays still – your brain and your eyes adjust, right? So right after World War II, the French came out with ‘Cinema Verité’, where they use the hand-held camera, and everything they shot looks like that movie with Ray Milland – Lost Weekend, the ‘drunk’ film. Everybody looks like they’re drunk, and what happens is that when you and I go to the movies we don’t want to know that we are looking at a movie. We want to be drawn in, into the proscenium, into that frame and be part of the movie. If the filmmaker does anything that destroys this illusion, I mean, at the outset to destroy the illusion, then I say ‘I’m watching a film’. So that French ‘new wave’ film, as it was called, came and went very quickly, because I think people finally realized that from a perceptual standpoint it was the wrong thing to do. Shooting pure hand-held for cinematographic purposes is absolutely wrong and stupid and should never be done, and you still see it in movies on occasion and it’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong. If you’re doing a newsreel from Bosnia, and I’m watching television, I know I’m watching television, I’m watching war footage. No problem. But for a movie, no, because you are destroying the illusion.

Do you think that the use of the Steadicam has tended to determine a particular style of film making?

Well, yes, of course. As I said, it has given an all-new language to filmmaking and there are any number of films in which you can see that.

How do you feel about using (and possibly abusing) the Steadicam for making long shots?

Oh yes, long shooting, that became a context with Larry McConkey. It’s the same thing we had when the zoom lenses first came out and they were used and abused, I think the zoom much more so than the Steadicam. Then, little by little, they realized that you shouldn’t abuse it, like when we see a garden rose zooming in and out. So yes, I think doing something extra long just for the sake of doing it is foolish and not necessary.

What do you think about the Panaglide?

I don’t know what Garrett told you, but it was a funny story about Bob Gottschalk. As I said, he was a paranoid President. When I started, our companies were, in fact, within two blocks of each other, so Gottschalk of course was very annoyed any time we were developing something that would compete with him, because Panavision then, like now, didn’t sell anything – everything they design and manufacture is for rent only. And our company was just the opposite. We don’t rent anything, everything we make we sell, and who do we sell it to? We sell it competitively to the other rental companies, and that was really annoying for him. So there was this rivalry always.

When we came out with the Steadicam, he went to the trouble of getting our patent. In Japan they published the patent before the real shoot, so he was able to see exactly what we were creating. Then he went and made the Panaglide to compete with us, but he used a different material and design for the arm; instead of using springs he used these gas cylinders and the problem with the gas cylinder is that it had friction. If an operator with the Panaglide jumps up and down you can see the camera doing this. Also, they didn’t have our special monitor. They used just a black-and-white monitor and so that wasn’t good either. What happened was that as soon as our patent was issued in 1976, we brought suit against Panavision and the lawyers for Panavision told Mr Gottschalk it was better to sell it. So we talked about it and negotiated the settlement. Then they paid us royalties – we collected, oh, I don’t know, a couple of hundred thousand dollars from Panavision. Then Mr Gottschalk died and the man that came in to take his place was the chief technologist at the Warner Corporation (at that time Warner Brothers). He ran the company for the next couple of years and he invited Garrett to come in and he wound up getting arms and vests from us. So the Panaglide came to disappear.

Was it difficult to create interest in the Steadicam and encourage operators and filmmakers to use this new tool?

Absolutely. In the beginning it was extremely hard to get people to appreciate this tool and of course it was thanks to Garrett and films like Rocky that people really started becoming interested, but the problem was training operators. You had to have a trained person and, back in the beginning, it was not that easy to convince somebody that this would be a good thing to do, so it was long and difficult. We didn’t think of doing the workshops right away but when we realized that this was the key, the way to get trained operators, that’s when we started the workshops and that was the final step in getting it over the top.

How do you feel about people starting out directly as Steadicam operators without having any experience as camera operators?

That’s an interesting question, because I think in the beginning we were primarily dealing with people who had not had prior operating experience and, as a consequence, some of them were not successful. Now we are getting more and more camera operators coming to learn about the Steadicam and that’s a much better situation, because they already know about composition and framing. It’s always preferable to have the background.

In your opinion, does the fact that the operator sees the shot in a monitor instead of through a viewfinder make a difference?

If you weren’t getting a good quality image, if the videotape wasn’t really sharp and clear, it would be a problem. That’s why we made it a point with our special monitor to have it be a high resolution monitor – it’s like 670 lines resolution – and I think for composing under certain situations that the operator will be able do that better looking at the monitor than with his eye on the viewfinder.

Yes, but also when you have the camera near your eye you see with one eye and look around with the other and instead, here there’s a certain distance – so the way you move and look around is different, and perhaps how you think about framing is different.

Yes, but I think that’s a more convenient way to go. Back in the beginning, when we spent these three-quarters of a million dollars, we went through every kind of thing. We had fibre optics, that was Garrett’s idea, then we tried to put a little video on a helmet, then we all agreed on putting it down there where the guy can see with both eyes free. That’s why we kept it down, because that way he is looking at the monitor and looking at the floor, so he can protect himself from tripping and falling.

Have you ever thought about changing something in the Steadicam?

We always think about changes and we are constantly coming up with new ideas.

How do you feel about technological research in filmmaking and the innovations it brings? For example, the fact that the use of computers in post-production makes it less of a challenge to shoot a scene perfectly and relieves the operator of some of his responsibilities in this sense?

Well, I don’t think the computers relieve them.

I mean if you do something not very good, you can improve it, but it’s artificial.

Yes, you can correct the takes, no questions about it. I think that’s put the wrong emphasis on what technology brings to filmmaking: the real emphasis should on be the kinds of films that you can make now that were totally impossible before – Titanic, for example. When I first heard that he was going to do Titanic it sounded like a stupid idea – a remake. We had seen the film of the Titanic and I never dreamed of the incredible artistry that he would bring to it by virtue of the fact that he could use all these computer-generated images and I think that’s where the impact of the technology is really felt. The fact that they can use it in a film for illustration is a good thing. Not film restoration, but the classic use as I just said. Something to correct errors is trivial. But in terms of the kind of films you can make, Jurassic Park would not have been possible, not with the impact that it had.

In the final analysis, one of the things I always like to say is that filmmaking is an art form and technology is its palette and so the thing that makes filmmaking an exciting art is the technology that supported it. That’s why I make the point about the Academy of Arts and Sciences pushing that every time. I am charmed by the film technology of the Scientific and Technical Awards categories. I’m inside the Academy, and I’ll always keep pushing for greater recognition for our effects.

Edmund DiGiulio, Engineer, Camera Inventor, Developer of many Cinematographic Tools, Vice-Chairman and President of Cinema Products Corporation

Cinema Products was founded by Ed DiGiulio in 1968 and has received several Academy Awards for scientific/technical achievements in professional motion picture camera design and engineering; in particular, the first Class Award (1978) went to the inventor Garrett Brown and the Cinema Products engineering staff who developed the Steadicam.

Ed DiGiulio is also a fellow of the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers, a fellow of the British Sound and Television Society and an associate member of the American Society of Cinematographers. He is a member of the Academy of the Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and currently serves as a Chairman of its Scientific and Technical Award Committee.

Interview with Vittorio Storaro, Rome, July 1999

How do you feel about the Steadicam?

The Steadicam is undoubtedly something that had to happen, someone had to invent it because in so much cinema, particularly in the 1960s (‘Free cinema’ as it was called in England, ‘Nouvelle Vague’ as it was called in France, etc.) there was this need for freedom of movement.

Figure 4.6 Vittorio Storaro, who strikingly photographed Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, is seen here with his two Steadicam operators: Garrett Brown and son Jonathan Brown, on the set at the Beverley Wilshire Hotel, 1998. Photo courtesy Garrett Brown collection

The camera has taken a certain route; at the beginning it was fixed on a tripod then, during the silent movie era, directors wanted to be able to move it, to give it the narrator’s point of view: it was put on wheels, on trains, on cars, on carts, on wheelchairs, wherever, so long as it could be moved.

Curiously enough, some technological innovations sort of blocked a certain possibility of expression. Sound, which was one of the first great innovations in 1927, stopped camera movement: during shooting the cameras were enclosed inside little ‘telephone booths’, ‘little aquariums’ because of the noise they made. Then gradually, technology evolved again, blimps were put on the motors and the film magazines, and the camera could be moved again.

When colour came along it brought another problem, for lighting, which black-and-white cinema had developed a lot as a means of expression, because at that point they were afraid of shadows. Then gradually, during the 1970s, with my generation, light and shadow were allowed to meet up again, giving us that continual dialogue which had previously existed in black-and-white cinema.

The arrival of new wave cinema brought back this sense of freedom; the camera, that is to say, the author’s, the director’s, the writer’s, or the movie maker’s eye, had to be able to move freely everywhere, no matter what. Unfortunately, the arrival of this kind of freedom once again caused problems with lighting, as with the camera moving so freely it became important not to see any studio lights.

During the 1960s, Raoul Coutard and Jean Luc Godard with A Bout de Souffle (it’s one of the classic movies) in France, and Gianni Di Venanzo in Italy, with all the movies he made with Antonioni, Rosi, Fellini, Maselli, revolutionized the lighting system, letting us use light freely again. The use of natural light plus a certain kind of mixture of natural and artificial light, the use of artificial lights that were already available, made this great freedom of movement possible. So the Steadicam had two forerunners such as these that led the way a bit, during the 1960s and up to 1974.

In 1975 I was in Los Angeles with Francis Coppola getting ready to leave for the shooting of Apocalypse Now, and Ed DiGiulio had us try out the first Steadicam. Both Francis and I tried it and neither of us, obviously fairly well-acquainted with the hand-held camera but not at all with the Steadicam, thought that it was something we could use. In fact, we didn’t use it. I had anyhow tended to operate the hand-held camera myself, like the famous scene in Il Conformista (The Conformist) running along behind Dominique Sanda as she fled through the woods – since then I had always done the hand-held camera shots, up to Apocalypse Now, by myself. The introduction of the Steadicam stopped me from continuing what I might call this expression of myself, but it happened at the right time, when I had become so involved in lighting that anyway I no longer felt that I wanted to participate in moving the camera, including the hand-held camera, and that therefore it was right to delegate it to someone else.

Of course, if the Steadicam had been invented when we made Il Conformista we would have used it, even if the hand-held camera gives that sort of human trepidation that in some cases makes it more dramatic, but those are very rare. Generally speaking, we always wished for a stabilized hand-held camera. So Garrett Brown came along at that moment at the right time for us, but probably late for movies as a whole because if it had been invented years before it would certainly have been used.

Giving the narrator’s point of view the possibility of going anywhere certainly opened a very important door for cinematographic expression. At the same time, like all innovations, it had certain consequences. The first is that with the camera now moving and going everywhere you can’t let the studio lights be seen: the danger, again, is that it can make lighting be considered just a generic thing which allows the camera to move freely, and this has been a trap for many moviemakers.

Luckily for me I, however, needed to do a different kind of thing: to move the light and not just the camera, especially working with Bertolucci. He personally decides, and feels passionately, the camera movement and I feel and decide the lighting movements. Therefore, I’ve always felt the need to have something that will let me control all the lighting from one point – the lighting control console.

In 1981, while working on One From the Heart, I first had the chance, after having seen it on a trip to Las Vegas with Francis Coppola, to use the lighting control console, which had been introduced in television a year before. It makes it possible to control all the lights in the studio from one point. Zoetrope Studios bought us this console for One From the Heart and, in fact, the idea with One From the Heart was to give the camera an enormous freedom of movement. Three camera operators worked on One From the Heart : Enrico Umetelli, Tom Ackerman and Garrett Brown. In One From the Heart, as I have a very particular style, in agreement with Coppola and with his approval, I gave the Steadicam a passionate character. Every time there was a rush of feelings between the main characters, determining an emotional state, the Steadicam got in there with them, so it was always seen as almost an emotional freedom, not restricted to certain strict set-ups, as a dolly might have been. It was used as part of a vision of cinematographic style and not just for the freedom of not having to lay tracks.

I had met Garrett Brown during Reds, he had basically done a sequence, a shot – the arrival at Bakunin, and I was certainly struck not only by the possibilities of the device, but also by the great virtuosity with which Garrett used it. When I was planning One from the Heart I thought he was the right person to call.

Garrett is very complicated, with all his interests, being everything from inventor to operator, and it’s very hard to find him available. However, he accepted, signed the contract, but he said right away that on some dates he wouldn’t be able to be there. Each of those times he brought a substitute, whom I saw rehearse the shot, and I was never able to shoot a single frame, because no substitute, at least at that time, matched Garrett not only for technological virtuosity, but also for the sensitivity with which he used the Steadicam. So, since the film had mostly only one set, in one place, in one studio, with Coppola who was fairly agreeable towards certain things, we put off some sequences waiting for Garrett. I think that Garrett left a very clear mark on One from the Heart with his camera work, in my opinion as important as that he did on The Shining, even if that is better known, or what he did at the beginning with Rocky. After Garrett, lots of students, lots of people have become more or less capable of manoeuvring the Steadicam; Garrett, however, designed it, has lived with it and he uses it almost as if it were an extension of his own body.

What I’ve seen with some people I’ve met, sometimes only briefly, on certain films, for a few days, a few sequences, is that the various workshops that prepare new Steadicam operators, rightly enough can’t go beyond a certain depth. They prepare you by teaching you about the technological structure, the way to use your body, all that’s very good, but what is lacking in my opinion in that kind of workshop is the imaginative side. I mean, I’ve never met a Steadicam operator who has a sense of aesthetics, a sense of composition – obviously, you can’t learn that in the ten or fifteen days that the class lasts, but at least the ‘seeds’ of an idea could be planted. Usually what they get is the idea of potential, that is to say, they think they’re supermen, that they can do anything, which is understandable since they start from the idea of being willing to do anything, ready for anything, to say ‘no problem, I’ll do it’, which is a good mindset to push you to do unthinkable things, sometimes very dangerous things. But it’s not only jumping from one place to another, running at a certain speed, arriving more or less in time, getting down from a helicopter, climbing stairs, jumping on a bridge and running 100 m with that kind of weight and that amount of equipment, which is what it means to be a camera operator, physical things which, don’t get me wrong, are necessary for someone who has to carry a serious weight in that particular situation. There’s also a whole other concept, which is the story, the idea, the figurative concept, the composition. Unfortunately, partly because of the technological problem, in the sense of how much you can see in the little monitor, and partly for the running, sweating and walking backward, the operator is barely able to centre the character or keep him within that space, and he certainly can’t compose an image.

Of course, there are some sequences and shots in which basically what’s important is that the character more or less happens to be in the frame a certain percentage of the time. In other films, look at One From the Heart or The Shining, composition is of fundamental importance. And you can see that in those cases, these kids, who sometimes are very mature and serious people, aren’t educated, I mean, they haven’t learned how to do framing and I’ve often insisted to Garrett that he should enlarge the monitor and make it visible. I understand the problem with colour, despite the fact that composition is often also chromatic, but at least in balancing the images, the fact of being able to see them well and not only in how much you see, but in understanding what you see, these kids should at least have an inkling of the meaning of the film. Unfortunately, one reason is that often, in movie productions, they are hired for only one sequence, or for one special shot, for two, three days: one, they don’t know anything about the movie; two, they don’t know anything about the story; and three, they don’t have anything to refer to regarding the cinematographic sense of the movie, because this kind of information isn’t usually given to them. When it happens with me I try, even if only quickly, to give them a minimum of background, so that they can understand what kind of dimension, style, sensation and feeling they have to try to pick up on. It’s true that this is a handicap, but it’s also true that there isn’t an education in this direction. Things are getting better, a little at a time. The Steadicam has been a little bit ‘overused’. Any technological innovation like the zoom, like colour, etc., is exaggerated at the beginning, used even where it’s not needed, where there’s no purpose to it.

I hope all that is in the past and that today the Steadicam can be used more intelligently, because it’s a very great device to write with, but I think it should be used in a more appropriate way, within a particular writing style, consequently with particular rules of grammar, with a particular syntax, with a particular language, otherwise it’s very dangerous. Dangerous because there’s this continual travelling, going around, that can even become distracting for the viewer. The concentration of an emotion, a feeling, is lost, and strength is lost at the very moment when it is absolutely indispensable for giving that kind of feeling. If the Steadicam isn’t used knowledgeably, not only is the figurative aesthetic sense dulled, but so is the sense of lighting aesthetics. Today many people who are used to the new films, the new lenses and the Steadicam for shooting, use only, exclusively, ‘available light’. That natural light or that artificial light remains on and therefore you can shoot everywhere and you lose the sense of the studio, the research, the will to understand what lighting will give the right atmosphere for that movie, which is fundamental.

What I mean is that the Steadicam – Garrett knows these things very well so he won’t be upset – is a great device, which gives great freedom, but if it’s being used by someone who doesn’t have a healthy and correct idea of what it is, it can be very dangerous.

Does the fact that you look at a monitor instead of through a viewfinder, therefore with both eyes and from a certain distance, make a difference with regard to how the shot is conceived?

Yes, this is an interesting question because it brings us to current times. The use of electronic images is becoming continually more widespread in movies. In 1980 I was asked for the first time, by Warren Beatty on Reds, to have a small video camera along with the movie camera since, being both actor and director, he couldn’t see himself as a director would when he was in front of the camera. I didn’t believe in that kind of thing because at that time I still followed the teachings I had been given, I thought of the emotion of seeing the daily rushes for the first time on the big movie screen, the mystery of discovering certain things, the psychological weight that a camera operator has, etc. etc., all those ridiculous things, because I was ignorant, I wasn’t acquainted with the device. Seven years later, I had confirmation of this, when Bernardo Bertolucci called me for The Last Emperor. I said to him, ‘Let’s take this new thing’ and he said to me again, as I’d already heard him say, ‘No, I’ll never look at it anyhow, I’m not interested, because I love the emotions of the projection’, etc. When the first shot of The Last Emperor was done, I said ‘Bernardo, you can see it if you want to’, and he said ‘How’s that?’ and I said, ‘If you come over here’ and I let him watch it and he was shocked and from that moment on a new world opened up to him.

I mean, there’s no doubt that the introduction of the electronic image in movie making, that is to say, the possibility of seeing a shot in a monitor and then also during play-back and therefore of seeing it again has relieved the camera operator of a big responsibility, all that information that he had to get during a shot and respond to. Sure, it’s taken away from his importance, that’s true, but it’s also taken away responsibility that shouldn’t have been weighing on him.

Today the director, the cinematographer, the assistant director, can see on the monitor the timing, the rhythm, the things that are more or less valid in a shot, and they see it on a monitor with two eyes; before, they saw those things after the director. And certainly to know how to transmit the necessary emotion technically, to propose it through a lens, a camera movement, or a dolly, I would look through the loupe, of course there was a certain feeling, because you isolate yourself from everyone else, when you look in a monitor there’s all kinds of distractions around that can take away your concentration on that particular composition, it’s true, but it makes so much more communication possible, if you use certain tricks, a few black screens around the monitor, a minimum of privacy when you look at it, you can get back that concentration on seeing a composition. And at the same time that the camera operator is feeling that emotion; simultaneously those of us watching the monitor, the director and myself, basically, or other collaborators, we are living it as well, and therefore we can understand and make certain decisions while we are watching and understand what we’re thinking at the same time that we see our idea being carried out. I think this is important.

The Steadicam operator, to get back to your question, has to concentrate so much on that little green screen, which is a bit too small and in my opinion a bit too green, and not get distracted by all the things happening around him, that is complicated. The screen should be made bigger, certainly, and it should be more visible in the sense of illumination, this is a question of technology; however, things are gradually getting better, and he can isolate himself and pay more attention to composition.

Nowadays, since the 1980s, camera operators have lost this big responsibility and also this great importance that they had on the set, today they’re sort of ‘implementers’, even too much, in my opinion, because today the person who takes responsibility is the one watching the monitor. You don’t say to the operator anymore ‘How was it?’ and according to if he says ‘good’ or ‘not good’ you’d do it again or not, but you watch it and you decide. Also, however, the operator will surely become more of a teleoperator, in other words a television camera operator, and he’ll see with two eyes, and consequently a certain kind of methodology will change. Certainly, we’ll have to adapt to this new way of seeing not only that image, but that image as a part of the external world, and it will be up to the operators a little bit to be capable of doing that well.

How much can the effect of a Steadicam shot be controlled and predicted compared with a hand-held camera, and is it important to be the one actually using it to be sure of the effect?

No, because at any rate it’s extremely rare to find a director or a cinematographer who use the hand-held camera themselves, they’ve always delegated the job to an operator, so it’s the same.

And can you control the effect?

No, you don’t control it, you have to delegate it to a person who surely knows how to do it better than you do. Today the fact that you can see it on the monitor lets you understand what he’s doing – first you saw it a day or a week afterwards, when it was projected, and today you see it simultaneously, so you can direct him, scene by scene, shot by shot.

Does the fact that with the Steadicam you can do endlessly long sequences, going up stairs, through doors, combination shots, in other words, do a lot of things in just one sequence, make it harder to do the lighting, or is the same as with any sequence?

No, it’s certainly harder, I mean it’s clear that a single, fixed frame can be given better lighting, in other words, more accurate lighting, and when the camera moves the lights have to be kept out of this movement, so they have to be further away and therefore less precise. In this sense, any camera movement makes lighting less precise. That doesn’t mean it will be better or worse, it will be different, but the important thing is that it’s right for the scene. That emotion that movement gives can make up for the emotion which has been lost, and that’s all right. There are two fundamentally important things: the light has to be made as free as the camera, if you don’t do this you go backwards, you return to that ‘non-light’ of the period when colour was first introduced, when everyone was afraid of shadows. You end up putting a lot of light everywhere, like they do now in television, unfortunately, so that the camera can go everywhere, which is the danger with a lot of movies.

It’s important to study a lighting system which has the same freedom as the system of moving the camera, which lets the lighting vary as the camera moves, maintaining a figurative concept through the lighting according to where the camera is going. The lighting console lets me use lighting in a certain way, at that moment, from that angle; in other words, I’m not forced to use lighting in a certain way because otherwise you’ll see the lights when the camera goes in a certain direction. When the camera moves I can turn those off and turn on others, so I can combine lighting movement and camera movement.

If, as the cinematographer, I don’t have the possibility of moving the light in the same way that the camera moves, practically speaking I take away what the lights can express in favour of what the camera can express. Therefore, in my opinion, the Steadicam makes it absolutely necessary to be able to move the lighting. If you don’t have this possibility, the Steadicam does damage.

So did the innovations in lighting come afterwards or at the same time?

They came more or less at the same time, for two different reasons. I didn’t come up with this idea for that reason, I needed it for an expressive thing within the scene, because I wanted the lighting to change during the same shot. When the Steadicam was introduced, it became even more useful because I could move it according to the camera movement. One didn’t lead me to the other.

How do you decide to use the Steadicam in a movie – from a narrative and technical point of view, when do you decide that a certain movement should be done with the Steadicam?

I used the example earlier of One from the Heart, where it was tied to the characters’ feelings. With Bullworth, directed by Warren Beatty, which dealt with a senator’s election campaign, we had to illustrate the various movements and situations that that created.In America, during the election campaigning, there’s a TV station which follows everything a candidate does, all day long. I decided to use the Steadicam to show this descriptive aspect of ‘Senator Bullworth’s day’, being particularly careful to introduce it in the scene just when the main character has a sort of personal revelation and decides to overturn the usual rules for how a candidate should act and start always telling the truth.

All the first part, before this character’s ‘awakening’, we did ‘fixed’, with the normal, fixed camera, never moving it. We feel this static atmosphere, and then when he decides to tell the truth and discovers how strongly he feels about it, and nothing else matters because anyway he’s committing suicide so there’s no problem in telling the exact truth so he says whatever comes into his mind, from that moment on he takes off on an emotional voyage of discovering the truth, and he offers this truth to the electorate. From the moment that this happens it’s all shown through the Steadicam, and we did the whole movie with Garrett, because I thought of Garrett Brown, he hadn’t done this thing for a long time but he told me he’d be interested in something at this level, with me and Warren. He said he’d come, and that he’d like to bring Jonathan Brown with him, because there always had to be two Steadicams.

Eighty per cent of the movie was shot with the Steadicam, giving this emotional component of freedom, transgression, not following the rules, not staying within the tracks. We had that kind of freedom of movement and at the same time through the TV monitor I could see what Garrett was doing and with the console I would change the lights according to where he was going. The lighting varied according to the movement of the camera or to express something on its own. The camera dictated and instead of being a slave to that, the light was a willing participant in this freedom of movement.

We were constrained by time, in the sense that Warren Beatty knows how to say ‘action’ but he doesn’t know how to say ‘stop’ and he likes to redo the shots again and again. The Steadicam has a limit, which is the limit of the small magazine. For us it was a little bit of a problem because with every shot we had to change the magazine.

That was one problem and another was the psychological drama which today all of us filmmakers go through when we compose an image, because we can’t compose complete and final images anymore since their life on a movie screen will unfortunately be extremely short and they’ll be ‘decomposed’ for television. They’re going to be cut, since television space has different proportions, horizontal and vertical, than movies have. For this reason I came up with the idea, with my son Fabrizio, of a system called ‘Univisium’, a name derived from combining the words unite and vision, a system that can be used in the future to unite cinematographic and television images, putting the two compositions – that of modern television and the 65 mm of future cinematography – together in a balanced way. It will unite the 1 to 2.21 of the 65 mm, the big screen, and the 1 to 1.79 of high definition in a new proposal, 1 to 2, a perfect, basic proportion, the one of the Parthenon, the golden proportion¹⁵ and there will be a much larger area than that of the normal panoramic, much more clearly defined and better quality, also because anamorphic lenses won’t be used. It will be freer, less awkward, without distortions. It will be a big stimulus, not only at the technological level of improvements in quality, but also at the creative level. With the ‘Univisium’ system every camera magazine travels at three perforations per frame, not four anymore, making it 25 per cent faster, so each magazine lasts 15 minutes instead of 11 minutes as they do now. This system is a big advantage for the Steadicam, because it will have 25 per cent more time available to it. Likewise, everything costs 25 per cent less, because it uses 25 per cent less negatives, transportation, development, printing and so on. So I think that with the ‘Univisium’ system the Steadicam will take a great leap forward.

The Steadicam has been around for 20 years now. Is there something that has changed from the first time you saw it being used or used it, has there been an evolution, for instance with regard to style, has it imposed a certain style?

Basically, in my opinion, even if it’s natural to think of a producer, an assistant director, or a director who, on locations where it would be complicated to do a tracking shot, finds it convenient to use the Steadicam, I think that basically it should be seen by the directors or cinematographers who set the style of the shot as a language, in other words, as a way of writing a certain sequence with the camera, the choice of saying use a camera car, a dolly, a zoom, or a Steadicam. I think that it offers a lot of possibilities, like any other device, and that it should be used according to what you want to tell.

Being so emotionally tied to the Steadicam, also because he’s capable of using it in a certain way, Garrett really thinks that the Steadicam can replace every other piece of cinematographic technical equipment, and that he can go anywhere moving the same way. I don’t agree with him and I’ve always told him so. I mean, a tracking movement, whether forward, sideways or backwards, is a very particular movement, which is different from the movement of a Steadicam, which is different from the movement of a dolly, which is different from the movement of a crane, which is different from the movement of a hand-held camera. In other words, the Steadicamera has a Steadicam movement, there’s this floating feeling that is almost aquatic, let’s say, that has an emotion of its own, that has a beauty of its own, a style of its own and it should be used when that kind of movement is needed and I think it shouldn’t be a substitute for the movement of something else, even if it’s been done a lot because a dolly couldn’t be used, so they picked up the Steadicam and took two steps backward. But it’s different, it’s something else.

What do you think about point of view shots?

For example, with L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, directed by Dario Argento, just before I worked on Il Conformista. At that time I loved the hand-held camera, we’re talking about 1969, and I did all the point of views of the murderer with the hand-held camera, and certainly with that film, at that time – it was in techniscope, so it was panoramic format – there was this sense of discovery, of moving ahead, etc., it had a certain emotional, anxious feeling. It’s true that the Steadicam is a little bit dangerous in this sense, where you feel it move, it seems like a point of view, a subjective shot, which is different from a tracking shot. That’s why I insist that there are two different movements, and you have to establish at the beginning the style, how it will be used, not to confuse the viewer, because there’s the danger of creating confusion.

Today it’s easy to know how to do a dolly shot or how to use the hand-held camera, that’s a point of view and this is the director’s objective shot. The Steadicam can be dangerous in this sense but, let me repeat, when it’s not used properly. In other words, it’s great if it’s used as a point of view. In that case, it has to be given specific characteristics, of a point of view, so that it makes its presence clear to the viewer and doesn’t confuse him. Then, I think, its style is being respected.

Has the Steadicam changed moviemaking? Has it imposed a certain style?

No, style means how it’s used. It has imposed an availability, it certainly has changed how a lot of people see and think, opening the door to important new possibilities. Then, there are people like Kubrick, Bertolucci, Coppola, etc., who have used it in a very direct, creative way, so to speak, and others who have used it as a form of freedom. So a lot depends on who’s using it.

Can you give a negative example and a positive one?

The danger is that this great possibility of movement that the Steadicam offers can make the lighting somewhat static, because it has to be done so that the camera can go anywhere, and if there aren’t alternative solutions for lighting it becomes an ‘all over light’, therefore, a non-light. Not to give examples which could be unpleasant. This is the danger, the negative factor. As a positive factor, it undoubtedly increases freedom of expression.

Vittorio Storaro, Cinematographer

Vittorio Storaro has been a cinematographer since the 1960s. His work with Coppola, Beatty and especially Bertolucci is particularly acclaimed. He is the creator of the ‘Univisium’ system for obtaining the same image from two different mediums (a new aspect ratio 1:2, a balance between 65 mm and high definition).

He won Academy Awards in cinematography for Apocalypse Now, Reds and The Last Emperor, and received a nomination for Dick Tracy.

He is currently teaching cinematography at the ‘Accademia dell’Immagine’, L’Aquila, Italy.

Films

Among his films are: L’Uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo, D. Argento (1969); Il Conformista, B. Bertolucci (1970); Last Tango in Paris, B. Bertolucci (1972); Novecento (Act I/Act II), B. Bertolucci (1976); Apocalypse Now, F.F. Coppola (1979); La Luna, B. Bertolucci (1979); Reds, W. Beatty (1981); One from the Heart, F.F. Coppola (1982); Ladyhawke, R. Donner (1985); Ishtar, E. May (1987); The Last Emperor, B. Bertolucci (1987); Tucker: The Man and His Dream, F.F. Coppola (1988); Dick Tracy, W. Beatty; The Sheltering Sky, B. Bertolucci (1990); Little Buddha, B. Bertolucci (1993); Flamenco, C. Suara (1995); Tango, C. Saura (1997); Bullworth, W. Beatty (1998); Goya in Bordeaux, C. Sura (1999); Mirka, R. Benhadj (1999); Picking up the Pieces, A. Arau (2000); Dune, J. Harrison (2000).

Interview with Caroline Goodall, Volterra, September 1999

What do you think about the Steadicam and actors?

The problem for the actor is that when the Steadicam operator arrives on the scene, the Steadicam becomes the star and no one else is important. This is very hard on actors, especially important actors, stars, who have their ways of doing things, who know what they are doing. They would need to work with the director on the scene – suddenly the Steadicam becomes the star and they’re told what to do and they don’t like it, and you need an operator who is very sensitive, who is a tool of the director of photography and also on the side of the actor, and not against the director.

Another problem is there are so few maestros of the Steadicam, and because many operators think of it as a short cut to earn more money and become a DP: therefore they do a quick course in the Steadicam, arrive on the set without any real experience and they are frightened, the Steadicam often doesn’t work properly and, in order to offset that fear, they become difficult, presumptuous and self-important and actors generally find themselves lost in the scene as a result, because it’s all about where you are moving for the camera.

The problem is that it can actually become a handicap for the actor, because ‘Stop!’, after three passes something happens to the Steadicam, he has seen a boom in the shot, he has seen a light because he has gone the wrong way, the actor has to stop. Also what happens is the director realizes he can do a very long scene now, because he’s got the Steadicam, so therefore they’re asking actors to do five- or six-page scenes when normally, if they were using a dolly, they would be actually doing the scene a different way. So therefore they’re expecting a lot from an actor.

It’s very interesting because no one asks the actors how they feel, everybody thinks, what a wonderful tool for directors, also a wonderful tool for actors, for example it works in ER. What are the reasons ER works? Because it’s a television series, because they use a Steadicam all the time, but they are so rehearsed: the Steadicam operator sees what they are doing, and follows the actors. That particular director used to say ‘Follow the actors’ and not the other way. He definitely needed the two to understand each other, to jell together.

Because the Steadicam was invented by Garrett Brown to help the actor, originally it was for the director to allow the camera to follow what the actor is doing, without the actor having to hit a mark, walk in that door, walk out of that door. It’s also obviously to give you a special shot, but also it is a wonderful tool for the director.

Caroline Goodall

Caroline Goodall was born and educated in England, graduating with honours in English Literature and Drama from the University of Bristol.

At 18 years of age she starred in her first TV series, The Moon Stallion. For the next three years she combined her degree course with professional acting work on stage and film.

Her stage work in the UK is extensive. She has worked in the West End at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre, The Royal Court and has been directed by Alan Ayckbourn, John Caird and Mike Bradwell, among others.

She toured Australia acting in Richard III for the RSC and initiated a fruitful career in Australia, during which she starred in four mini-series and two films.

In 1990 she was asked by Steven Spielberg to play Moira Banning in Hook. She worked again for Spielberg as Emilie Schindler in Schindler’s List and also with Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger), Barry Levinson (Disclosure) and Ridley Scott (White Squall).

Recent features in Europe include Harrisons Flowers, directed by Elie Chouraquiu, The Secret Laughter of Women and Les Epedees des Diamants (Diamond Sword) with Jason Flemyng. She has also starred in numerous European TV films and mini-series, including the recent Trust, Sex and Death and The Sculptress.

Caroline is married to cinematographer Nicola Pecorini. They divide their time between homes in Tuscany and Los Angeles.

Notes

1    Chion, M. (1981) Le system Steadicam. Cahiers du Cinema (Technique), no. 330, pp. VII–VIII.

2    Rotunno, G. (1997) Interview with the author, February.

3    DiGiulio, E. (1976) Steadicam – 35: A revolutionary new concept in camera stabilization. American Cinematographer, July, 57 (7), p.786.

4    Chion, M. (1981) Le system Steadicam. Cahiers du Cinema (Technique), no. 330.

5    ibid.

6    Chion, M. (1982) Response. Cahiers du Cinema (Technique), February, no. 332, p.XII.

7    Brown, G. Interview with the author, January 1997.

8    Wolf, Mike Nichols, USA, 1994.

9    See Chapter 2, ‘Shooting with the Steadicam: Preparing and programming the shot’.

10  For example, Dead Bang, J. Frankenheimer, 1989, filmed with five Steadicam operators.

11  Italian TV channel.

12  For example, Cliffhanger, R. Harlin, 1993.

13  The first Italian film was Phenomena, D. Argento, 1984.

14  CONI: Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano.

15  For more information see Storaro’s web site www.Univisium.com. See also Bankston, D. and Holben J. (2000) Inventive New Options for Film. American Cinematographer, February, 81 (2), pp. 96–107.