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MillimeterFade to Black:
Janusz Kaminski, Cinematographer
May 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Janusz Kaminski, finally a dad at 45, is managing just fine with his two-week-old (at press time) twins, Bruce and Helena, though he says, “All they want to do is eat and sleep right now.” Speaking of which, Helena drains a bottle offered by Kaminski and falls asleep while her dad discusses his beloved craft.
Kaminski is two weeks away from commencing color-timing sessions for Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and a few months away from starting production on Spielberg's next project, still untitled (at press time), about the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But at this moment, the two-time-Oscar-winning DP's biggest photographic dilemma concerns digital photos of the twins.
“I bought a digital camera and printer, and … in my opinion, the images were horrible when printed,” he says. “I really wonder about our ability to preserve history photographically — people download pictures to their hard drive, and eventually, they disappear. I fear we are creating people who accept visually inferior images as the norm.
“Having said that, I have a friend who is a professional photographer. He gave up shooting negative altogether and fell in love with shooting digital. He creates amazing images. For professionals, things will work out, but for the general population? I worry digital is degrading our aesthetics.”
The same dilemma confronts Kaminski in his professional work. He and Spielberg remain film purists — they still shoot, edit, and finish using traditional means. In fact, Kaminski calls the first digital intermediate of his career, on The Terminal (2004), “an experiment.” For now, he is not repeating it. Although War of the Worlds has important visual effects (between 100 to 150 shots), they will finish it photo-chemically.
And yet, Kaminski concedes, “Realistically, we only have about two more years of conventional film timing and printing left, and after that, everyone will be timing digitally. But, frankly, the other aspect is time. I don't get much time to color-time a movie — it might be 10 days or two weeks. For a DI, you need about four or five weeks, and it costs $300,000 or $500,000 for [a high-end movie]. So that decision is more about logistics than aesthetics.”
The DP even expresses concern about some modern film stocks because of what he considers a tendency by manufacturers to move them closer to digital aesthetics. He says, “They are virtually grainless, very electronic. Eliminating grain eliminates emotion, in my opinion. There is more emotion in emulsion. … Some of the stocks that people are calling improvements are, in my view, not improvements at all.”
Kaminski says all this with what he calls “total respect” for the digital arts, and even heaps effusive praise on a 2002 film called Edi, shot and color-timed digitally by his Polish countrymen, director Piotr Trzaskalski and DP Krzysztof Ptak.
“That movie was beautiful because of the emotion in it, and it did not bother me that it was photographed digitally,” he says. “Other digital movies, I say, goddammit, I wish they shot on Super 16. It's just that, for right now, Steven and I want to stay pure to the art of filmmaking.”
War of the Worlds, however, returns Kaminski to the world of big-time effects for the first time since 2001's Artificial Intelligence: AI. But, he claims, capturing plates for longtime collaborator Dennis Muren and his team at ILM on this film was, in essence, no different from working on a Jurassic Park film. He says, “We are working with Dennis Muren. He's the best in the world. He makes it all so effortless.”
But, of course, it's not effortless — Kaminski is perpetually obsessed with imagery. Even as he cradles little Helena, he says he has been focused for more than a year on “the visual concept for the [Munich] film.”
“The movie always exists in the back of my mind,” he says. “I'm always accumulating knowledge. I have the visual concept down. Maybe not the essence, but I will in the next couple of weeks — what I want to do in the lab, color, quality of light. I'm always thinking about those things.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
