The Kid Keeps Shooting the Pictures

DP John Bailey discusses his more than 30 years in the business

by Jennifer M. Wood | Published February 3, 2007

Richard Gere in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo (1980)

As with many of his contemporaries, it was the directors and films of the French New Wave that led cinematographer John Bailey (The Kid Stays in the Picture, The Anniversary Party) to his destiny. Straying from the path that his undergraduate studies in chemistry and philosophy were taking him, Bailey opted to attend USC's graduate film school and has since built a career that would make even most accomplished DPs very jealous. Under the photographic tutelage of some of the industry's best, including Néstor Almendros and Vilmos Zsigmond, Bailey has worked on more than 50 features.

But while many DPs find a niche and stick with it, it is the challenge of trying something new that keeps Bailey going: from such Hollywood fare as Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood to indie breakthroughs like The Anniversary Party and performance films such as Swimming to Cambodia to documentaries like A Brief History of Time, Bailey's filmography is anything but boring. With his latest non-fiction entry, The Kid Stays in the Picture, in theaters now, Bailey took some time to speak with MM about the future of film, why he's always shifting gears and how he finds his alternate reality.

Jennifer Wood (MM): What was it about the films and directors of the French New Wave that made you change the course of your education and career?

John Bailey (JB): When I was in high school and had started college it was still the end of America's obsession with the "great American novel." Everybody who wanted to be an artist aspired to write the great American novel. What I sensed in the French New Wave, which I was exposed to when I was a studying in Austria, was a sense of freedom and spontaneity that caught me totally off-guard. I found a sort of crazed new spirit happening-everywhere really, but especially in the French New Wave-and somehow it just spoke to me in terms of its energy and its sense of breaking loose. And yet the themes it was dealing with were the same themes most novelists were trying to deal with. It was the beginning of a lot of experimentation in the literary form. Given my bent toward literature, I just saw it as a new kind of writing.

When I entered film school at USC, I thought I would get into an area of criticism or writing or film aesthetics and history. When I took a beginning camera course, that changed my whole perspective: I really saw the camera primarily as the writing instrument.

MM: Many people claim that the 1970s was the last explosion of great cinema, with directors like Robert Altman, Terrence Malick and Paul Schrader making their entries. Being part of this group, do you agree?

JB: I think it was the last great concentrated sort of movement or kind of common-shared zeitgeist. I think there are still tremendous numbers of interesting films being made, even in this country, but it's more diffused. Not that the French New Wave was ever a movement, but it did have the nucleus of a lot of those directors having come out of the Cahiers du Cinema, so it was a kind of focal point. American cinema has never really had that because of the hegemony and dominance of the studio system-even today. Essentially, everybody works as an individual and then in one way or another, through a film festival or relationship with a studio, ends up being sucked into the system, whether you want to or not.

One of the most interesting things I've ever read was an essay that Phillip Lopate wrote called "Anticipation of La Notte: The Heroic Age of Moviegoing" in one of his anthologies. He was a student at Columbia in the early '60s and started a cine club where they would run films as they opened and this essay is essentially about the anticipation and excitement of that next great film that was going to open. He really gives a terrific sense of what it was like to wait from week to week for the next big film to happen, the way people used to wait for a new Saul Bellow novel.

MM: It's unfathomable, now, to look back on all the great films that were released in those years and think that you could see so many of these "classic" films week after week. It's particularly disappointing when you see the films that people anticipate today. There isn't much substance.

JB: The terrible thing, of course, is as soon as an interesting, off-beat talent emerges out of the independent movement here, they're sucked up by the studio and essentially neutralized.

MM: In this year alone, we saw Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson-two cult directors who have been making small films for years-release Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings. Even Ang Lee is making The Hulk. There just doesn't seem to be any way around it.

JB: It's very difficult to stay out of that; the temptations are so great. Look at someone like Paul Schrader, whose vision is sort of perversely alienated from anything that might be considered studio mainstream. I just got back from Telluride, where they honored him, but the downside is the terrible price he's had to pay the last 15 years with just increasingly more and more problematic funding and more and more difficulty in getting his films made and distributed.

MM: You've worked with Paul on five films: what is it about him that makes you want to keep working with him; that makes you go back for more?

JB: First of all, as different as Paul and my views of the world might be, we always have these sort of shadow personalities-or shadow aspects of our personalities. Paul certainly, for me, represents the shadowy dark side of things for me. So whenever I work with him, it's an opportunity to descend into an alternate reality and to experience that-sometimes more than I can bear. He asked me to do Auto Focus and I read the script a number of times but I wasn't able to go there with him. I found it was too difficult for me.

But now he's got a fresh infusion-unfortunately, because of John Frankenheimer's death. He's going to be doing the next Exorcist film. Whether anything happens with it or not in terms of box office, it's certainly going to give him more studio credibility I think for the next film-and will hopefully make it a little easier for him. I hope to keep making films with Paul because he is a unique temperament. In an environment where so many of our films are either conceived as cookie-cutter films-or by the time they go through the studio preview process have become cookie-cutter films-it's extraordinary to be able to occasionally do a film with somebody as unique and kind of dangerous as Paul. I'm always looking for unusual things to do such as, even though it wasn't wildly experimental, a film like The Anniversary Party. That, both on a dramatic and technical level, was a different kind of experience for me.

MM: That film was made in the Dogme style that, though it is not an American movement, has really been embraced here. Then again, even The Anniversary Party would not have gotten made if Jennifer Jason Leigh weren't on board.

JB: That's the problematic environment that American films are made in. Because we have no official or quasi-official government support, as a lot of other countries do, alternative or independent or experimental filmmakers are really at the mercy of whatever kind of odd funding they can find, which is obviously very, very difficult. Whereas a lot of countries-in Europe and certainly in Canada-have programs where they create an environment in which offbeat films can be made.

MM: Going back to Auto Focus, you said that you read the script but that you couldn't "go there" with Paul. Is there anything about a script that will immediately turn you off to the project or won't allow you to connect to the material?

JB: There are several issues that I've spent most of my career, from the time I was an assistant, having to deal with and one is gratuitous violence or incendiary violence that's only meant to inflame people and doesn't have a dramatic or sociologically responsible context. That's always bothered me and has been the strongest determining characteristic when I read a script. A kind of parallel to that, of course, is violence oriented toward women or misogynistic, violent material. I've always had trouble with that and I try to avoid it as much as I can.

MM: What is the one thing in a script that will make you say 'yes'?

JB: The thing that I am always looking for-the thing that attracts me the most and will make me say yes more than anything else-is at least one intensely focused relationship, where there's something that stays between two people. It doesn't matter the genre, although I'm highly attracted to films that deal with nuclear families in crisis like Ordinary People or The Accidental Tourist and, in an off way, even As Good as it Gets. But any film that has a relationship that kind of jumps out at me and says 'this has importance or urgency.'

MM: I'm thinking of In the Line of Fire as you say this, as I think the relationship between John Malkovich and Clint Eastwood's characters was really one of the more interesting creations in recent film. Was that the main attraction to that film?

JB: Absolutely! In fact, when I met with Wolfgang I told him that I was very intrigued by the political and visual scale of the film. But to me the heart of the film-just like the heart of Ordinary People, with the encounters between Judd Hirsch and Tim Hutton, which are spaced all the way through the film-was the series of phone conversations between John Malkovich and Clint Eastwood. A kind of relationship develops and becomes a "mano a mano" conflict about good and evil.

MM: You began working as a DP at a time when an apprenticeship was the norm-something that, with the advent of digital technology and the lower cost of moviemaking, has all but disappeared. High school kids can go out and start shooting. Do you think it would be helpful to the current state of film to go back to having long-held apprenticeships?

JB: You know, I don't have any real strong sense about that because I chose the path I did and felt I learned a lot from it. But the technology has evolved and it's a lot simpler. People can do that and so if they're inclined to do that, great for them. There are risks, of course: when you rise to a big enough challenge and don't have the background or the technical expertise to [handle it] and you fall flat, it's very hard to climb back up because the level of judgement is so harsh. That's the downside to it. The upside is that I think you do have the ability to essentially be a sort of wild child and redefine an ever-changing medium. That aspect of it is great.

I certainly wouldn't want to say that I think everybody should follow the path that I took. One of the things that I did get out of it was the socialization-and I needed it desperately, because I was not the most socially interactive person in the world. I was kind of quiet and introverted. What I got out of the apprenticeship was the fly on the wall sort of thing. I was able, over a decade of work, to watch a tremendous number of men and women on the firing line and how they handled all of the defining crises that come up. I was able to watch and learn. That kind of human experience of how you deal with tension and crises and stress and communication at all the levels is something you can't learn from a manual-and you can't even learn by going out with a Sony PD150 or a Canon XL1 and shooting by yourself. So that aspect of it, for me, was really crucial. I learned from some enormously sensitive and beautiful artists, like Néstor Almendros, and I learned form some rather arrogant guys who fell flat on their faces. I just kind of watched their careers crash and burn in front of me. Not that I wished them ill, but I took note! [laughing]

MM: So you've shot in digital?

JB: Yeah, I've done three projects. I'm doing a kind of ongoing film with a critic/writer Shari Roman, who has written a lot about the Dogme movement and who has made a short film about Lars von Trier. She's taken a book that she wrote, called Digital Babylon, and essentially is going to a lot of the filmmakers that she talked about-Dogme filmmakers-and is doing a video documentary on their work. I went with her last winter to Sweden to film on the set of Lars Von Trier's new movie. It was the end of production, so Lars had already left, but we interviewed [cinematographer] Anthony Dod Mantle, who is sort of the Raoul Coutard of the movement, and is a dear friend of mine. We also interviewed Mike Figgis in his studio in London and I went with just a Sony PD150 and no crew. I mean, I had no lighting! I had to borrow a light from Mike Figgis, in fact. [laughing] I just went with that camera, and it was an amazing experience.

Last year I did a very interesting text that was financed by Kodak: a side-by-side 35mm film/Sony 24p HD camera comparison test that I did with two other cinematographers. Kodak produced a 22-minute, very well made film that essentially showed you the characteristics of the two mediums side-by-side. And, of course, The Anniversary Party, which we shot with a PAL DV Cam-it wasn't Hi Def.

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