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MillimeterJersey Production
Apr 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Director Kevin Smith credits Vilmos Zsigmond with helping him expand his shooting approach while making Jersey Girl.
Writer/director/producer Kevin Smith, known for quirky, low-budget fare including Dogma and Clerks, says that his recent film, Jersey Girl, qualifies as “a more mainstream picture, and a big film, for me anyway — it cost about $35 million when we were all said and done.” But more importantly, Smith says he learned a lot about filmmaking on the project, shot in and around the Philadelphia area, thanks in part to one big factor: “We somehow got [legendary DP] Vilmos Zsigmond to shoot this film.”
“I'm still trying to figure out why [Zsigmond] did this job, but I'm glad he did,” Smith adds.
The director says that, among other things, Zsigmond taught him to use fewer close-ups. “He was disconcerted that I had so many close-ups on the actors in my original cut.” Smith co-edited the film himself, along with Scott Mosier, on an Avid Media Composer.
“To me, it's a character piece, with lots of conversation, and I thought we should have that kind of approach. But Vilmos had a variety of coverage of those scenes with two or three cameras, so in the next pass, we pulled back and opened up the scope of the movie a lot more. He also made sure this movie has far more camera movement than I'm used to in my films.”
In particular, Smith says the project benefited from “lots of crane work that allowed us to move the camera in ways I haven't really done before.” He adds that, at first, he wasn't sure how this would be possible since much of the film's key interior scenes were shot inside small rooms. But Zsigmond's longtime key grip, Dicky Deats, offered up his invention, the Little Big Crane, which enabled the fluid camera movement in tight quarters (and which won Deats a Technical Achievement Academy Award in 1983).
“We were shooting on the 25th floor of this building for the opening party sequence in the film, and there was no way we could have gotten a larger crane in there,” recalls Smith. “Dicky just folded up his Little Big Crane, put it in a passenger elevator, and brought it up. It's so compact, it can be broken down into little pieces and reassembled. And yet, it gives you a lot of range.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
