[MUSIC PLAYING]
I treat my archives, principally
the still black and white photographs,
as if they're motion picture.
And I treat the live cinematography
as if they're painting.
That is to say, I wish them to have a kind of composed form,
that I'm rarely moving on them.
I'm just presenting them.
Each historical period has different amounts of access
to archives that you may have.
There's no footage before 1900.
There's no photographs before 1839.
That requires live modern cinematography.
And so this becomes hugely important
if you're making a film on Lewis and Clark, which is nearly
all live modern cinematography, and very little archival.
When I had to do a little bit of re-creation,
we were able to film at various junctures,
people who made a life or a hobby of recreating parts
of the Lewis and Clark journey.
It might be portaging canals over the Great
Falls in north central Montana.
It might be in Missouri, with a big keelboat
that was going up the Missouri and pushed by poles.
That was impressionistic, silhouetted against a sky,
or early at dawn in the morning, where there's no features
that you can distinguish.
And so, you're permitted, I hope, to make a transition back
to the past.
But if you're covering the national parks,
if you're covering the Civil War, it's not impressionistic.
You're getting the shot.
Sometimes you're making the decision
to shoot at the magic hour, just after dawn and just
before sunset, which is going to be giving you a certain quality
and warmth of light, which I particularly like.
Other people, though, would prefer
the honesty of the high sun and the kind of blue sky,
and sometimes the burned out image.
So it's whatever is working for you.
I'm willing to get up before dawn and shoot.
And I have done it many, many times
and gotten many great shots myself.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We were working on the Civil War.
And we went to Andersonville, which is the terrible--
the Park Service site at Andersonville,
which was the worst Southern prison, like it
was the fifth largest city in the Confederacy.
The Union men came out completely starved
and emaciated.
Walt Whitman himself said, can these
be men, which gave the name to our chapter.
But we went there.
And we met with the Park Service guy,
who was disagreeable in the extreme.
And he said, look--
we've been to all the parks of the Civil War battlefields
and things like that.
And we'll becoming a half an hour before sunrise.
He goes, no, you're not.
I open up at 7 o'clock.
I said, well, you know, this is summer.
This is going to be long gone.
He goes, sorry.
So we went.
We climbed the wall.
We got the best, best shots of these gravestones.
Because so many men died, they're all together.
And the sun came up.
And it's just some of the most beautiful footage
that we've ever gotten.
Climbed back over the wall.
At 7 o'clock, the guy pulls up.
He lets us in.
We go shoot the modest collection
of archives they have, and say, thanks so very much, and left.
It's sort of great.
And it speaks to some of the stuff you
have to do to get the shots.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We live in a really remarkable age.
We think because we have the devices
that we're all filmmakers.
We can actually all record moving pictures.
But it requires a lot of other skill.
But the important lesson, the good news of this versus this--
I don't know.
This cost-- when Buddy bought it, it must cost $35,000.
And that was, like-- in '79, this is like buying a house.
This doesn't.
And it means that if you've got something to say,
you're going to figure out a way to say it.
You can do it with a simple lighting kit,
as we've done most of our lives.
That kit has gotten a little bit more complex.
But it's not-- you know, we're not putting up in a truck.
We're pulling up in a Volvo, or Saab, or a Subaru.
Most of the cinematography takes place with this camera.
But more often than not, Buddy's Aaton, a tripod,
his magazine case, and a different grip case.
And I don't think he ever brought along a lighting kit
when we were doing any exteriors.
And if they're shadows, they're shadows.
If it's filled, it's filled.
And we've gotten some good stuff over the years.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I have eschewed re-creations and reenactments
in almost all the films I've done.
And when I have done it, it has been very minor
and usually shot in silhouette, in a very
distant and impressionistic way, and represents
a tiny, tiny fraction of the entire film.
And only because it helps set up personal points of view.
The one thing I did not want to do
is recreate anything in the Civil War series.
In fact, the only re-recreation in the entire 11 and 1/2
hours, nine episodes, is horse hoof, pounding
through a puddle of water.
That's it.
Everything else is of the period.
However, there are some uses of live cinematography
that we do to integrate, for a variety of reasons,
into archival scenes.
And I can think of lots of places
in which we've used them sort of separate and apart,
the live cinematography of the now quiet battlefields,
or the national parks, or whatever
or we've integrated them in the battles,
and in the national parks, and in other films.
The example I want to use right now is an important one,
I think.
It is in September of 1862, outside a little Maryland town
called Sharpsburg, where there is
a creek called Antietam Creek.
It's a battle that's like a symphony in three parts, three
movements if you will.
And so what I thought I'd do is start
from the beginning of the scene, to locate us
where the troops are, where the Northerns are blue,
where the Southerners are red.
And to go into the first part of this battle,
in the northern part of the battle,
and show the way in which I believe
some live cinematography is, out of character for our battle
scenes, integrated into the scene,
into the actual fighting.
So as we begin the Battle of Antietam, what I've done
is I have a map.
I then have a picture of the Dunker Church.
Here we have this extraordinary irony,
that one of the Northern objectives
is to get to a plateau where there
is a whitewashed simple church by a German pacifist Baptist
sect, that thinks even a steeple is too ostentatious.
And that into this extraordinarily peaceful
new world, in which so many people from Europe
have come to find the blank slate, the tabula rasa,
to make their lives, they happen to end up, unlucky them, here.
And then I tilt up Joe Hooker, the Union commander
of that part of the field.
And then it cuts to some canon.
Because what I've done with the map,
and with the Dunker Church, and this is
I've held off the fact of what's going to happen.
That map is telling you something's going to happen.
And if you know anything about American history,
you know some really heavy shit is about to happen.
But you need to actually also hold it in abeyance.
And you see the rosy-colored canon that are sitting there.
They're completely inanimate.
They've been there for 150 years.
And all of a sudden, we fire them.
They don't fire.
[CANON FIRE]
And what they fire is into this sort of abstraction
of a cornfield, from on top.
And so I want you to then be like the person reading
the map, that I suddenly have the bird's eye view, no longer
of the abstract graphic map, but of the cornfield in which this
happened.
And if you noticed in the beginning of that first shot,
it's very neat rows.
But the rows resolve as the commentary continues
about the pitched battle, into something more chaotic,
into something that's been destroyed.
It was the luck of this particular shot
that somehow the perspective of the rows begins to change.
And then finally, in one of the rare hand-held movements
outside the Battle of Gettysburg,
you're plunging as a Union soldier,
heading towards this very last moment in which the Dunker
Church appears.
And you see it there for just a second.
And then you're out.
Now, we're moving on with the story.
And we get other aspects of it.
So for me, one gave you kind of a aerial--
there's something kind of passive and introductory
about the canons until they fire.
Then you're given a kind of perspective like the map.
And then all of a sudden, you are a soldier.
And all of those things permit shifting perspectives
that actually help focus an audience's attention
into that moment.
It's not just a series of pictures and paintings
which we're holding at arm's length, in which they
retain their plasticity.
That is to say, they retain their two-dimensionality.
That's the enemy.
We want you to forget the two-dimensionality
of that photograph.
We want you to believe that it has dimension.
And in some ways, interestingly enough,
the live cinematography in this case
is used to integrate you into the moment and the place.
All of these are decisions that serve only one thing,
and that's the story.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Within the content of how you conduct an interview,
that I'm still a student.
And I feel that way.
But technically, I think it's pretty obvious
that we've improved.
And a really good example would be
to show you the evolution of filming David McCullough.
This first interview is at his home
in Martha's Vineyard in 1980, when
we're working our "Brooklyn Bridge" film.
We have got one massive key, that's
just washing the whole thing.
And I don't even think we have even a backlight, or a fill
light, or anything like that.
It's just there.
And it's kind of everything that I didn't want my films to be.
And even later in this "Brooklyn Bridge" film,
we've already gotten a little bit better.
But it had to do with the circumstances.
Second, he's in a rocking chair.
I really urge you, if there's going
to be one rule in documentary filming and in interviewing,
do not have your subject in a rocking chair because that
provides some focus, some sound, and other issues that
just don't make it work.
But for some reason, he's there.
We're also a little bit above him.
We hadn't yet learned about eyeline.
We're making this stuff up.
I'm in my 20s.
I mean this is elemental filmmaking.
And so we're a little bit above him.
And I don't like the sense of looking down on him.
And you want to-- if there's no communication
except among equals, we should be at his eyeline.
The next time we're doing this is for the Statue of Liberty.
It's just a few years later.
But already we're beginning to--
I-- I'm not sure if perfect is the right word.
But we're beginning to refine.
One, we don't need to have as much context anymore.
We're actually hoping that we're less interested in asking
the question, like where was this
taken, why is he in a rocking chair, what's
that radiator about, why is there
no other furniture in that room?
It just-- it begged too many other questions.
But now, we've got him.
It's the man.
We have an essential key light, way off to the side.
We're creating consciously lots of shadows.
We have just a little bit of a backlight,
that's picking up his silver hair, on the other side.
And we are now beginning to think
about what kind of background we have
and what part of that background we want to accentuate.
And in this case, we're permitting the lines
on a piece of furniture to be a defining
part of the left-hand part of the frame.
The dark side of the frame-- because, remember,
the key light is on the other side.
And there's a vast expanse.
We permit that to be a rather empty area.
So suddenly, we're making really different kinds of decisions.
It's not just oh, boy, we've got David McCullough.
We interviewed him again for our film on the Congress
a couple of years after that.
And we've got an interview, in which
we have been concerned that people have said,
oh, your things are too dark.
They're too-- too mysteriously lit.
And so now I think we're a little bit hyperconscious here
in a way that I wouldn't be.
Obviously, the key light's gone to the other side of David.
We've done something with some window.
We've probably jelled the window to keep
it at least slightly warm.
But now, we've got more of his face.
There's less of a mystery.
But it's not a bad shot.
It's working very well.
But I think it reflected a sense on my and my cinematographer,
longtime cinematographer, Buddy Squires' part,
that maybe that other stuff in that previous example,
wasn't the most egregious.
That we were way too much in this sort of half-moon depth
of darkness, sort of, you know, Marlon Brando is Kurtz
in "Apocalypse Now," where we might as well just shine
a light--
a flashlight under his leg, and do it.
So that's David, the third time.
Now, you-- Wayne's World, where a lot of time--
a lot of time is passing because David
narrated some films after that.
And then we were able to catch up with him.
And so you see the previous three interviews are all
with 16 millimeter film.
Now, it's digital.
We're controlling the frame a lot more.
It's a lot more complicated.
We're not in a 4:3 situation.
We're in a 16:9 situation.
We've got more of the background to fill.
You've got a bookcase here.
We don't have to have the definitions as harsh
as they are.
We've got still a central key light.
But instead of being at a half-moon position,
it's moved around to get the whole face.
And we're permitting that dark side
to have some detail in the background,
but to really fall off in the darkness.
It's hugely important for us to light them
in a position in which they're comfortable.
And that each one of these represents an evolution
in our sense of what it might be to create a situation where
they feel at ease.
And while they-- most of them don't necessarily ever even
look or think about looking at the shot that they're in, we
also know--
and we're filled with flags, and baffles, and lights,
and all sorts of things--
that they feel that this is a one-on-one, that all
of that stuff can disappear.
That's the main thing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When we do interviews, which are sort
of arguably one of the most important things we do,
the lifeblood of the production, we'll
bring a cameraman, maybe an assistant cameraman,
and a sound man.
We basically try to travel really light.
And we know we travel light.
And I have dear, dear friends who use two and three
times as many people as we do.
You need a camera kit.
You need a sound kit.
You need a lighting kit.
And that's all you need.
And then us, the suits, come in and help light
and do all those things, or sit on a crate
and ask the questions.
And that's it.
I've done an interview by myself.
I've just gone in, put the headphones on, and turned
the camera on and asked--
closed the viewfinder and asked the questions.
And you know, it was OK.
But I don't like to do that.
I need help, which really begs the question right now,
like what the hell is all of this?
Like, I can make my films for 40 years with a four-
or five-person crew at the very most.
Him, I get.
That's a sound person.
I need a sound person.
He's connected to this, the boom.
[THUDS]
She, I get.
She's the camera person.
I get it.
And it's always so interesting to me
that I have never been interviewed
with as small a crew as we take to do
the films for which people are interviewing us.
And there's just something kind of funny about that.
Like-- like this is the fourth camera, I think.
I don't even know where this camera came from.
That's amazing.