Cinematographer John Toll

John Toll

Throughout the history of
moviemaking, classic collaborations between directors and cinematographers
have resulted in signature cinematic styles. From D.W. Griffith
with Billy Bitzer to Paul Thomas Anderson with Robert Elswit,
visionary helmers have known that a loyal, innovative DP is the
surest way to gain fame as an auteur stylist. 

Though cinematographer John Toll has become a frequent
collaborator with several of the world’s most celebrated directors,
he has always succeeded in bringing his own vision to the forefront
of a film’s visual makeup. Though their stories could not be more
different, films such as Legends of the Fall, Braveheart and The Thin Red Line share a common cinematic bond that can
only be attributed to Toll’s camerawork.

While still in college, Toll was offered a part-time
job as a production assistant with David Wolper. “I would go out
on some of these shoots and watch the cinematographers and then
go to dailies and see how their work translated to images on a
screen and it didn’t take long for me to decide that this was
definitely for me.” Beginning his professional career as a camera
assistant, Toll worked in television and commercials before beginning
his feature film career in the early ’90s. Since then, Toll has
gone on to become one of the most respected DPs in the business.
His work in Legends of the Fall and Braveheart earned
him the rare honor of back-to-back Academy Award wins. And though
he did not win the Oscar for his work on The Thin Red Line in 1998, he was awarded various other accolades from such
organizations as the American Society of Cinematographers and
the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Most recently, Toll’s work can be seen in director
Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, an English-language remake
of Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos. In an interview
with MM, Toll discusses the impact of an Oscar,
the process of collaboration and what it takes to empty Times
Square.

Jennifer Wood (MM): You worked in
television and commercials before your career in feature films
began. What were some of the adjustments you had to make to your
style and work habits?

John Toll (JT): As a cinematographer, I find
the main difference between working in TV or smaller scale features
as opposed to larger scale features is the amount of time you
actually have to accomplish the work. Basically what this means
is that when developing a visual style for any particular film,
you need to do it in a way which serves the project in terms of
visual intent regarding the story, characters, mood, etc. but
which also allows you to be responsible to a schedule and budget.

One of my first jobs as a director of photography
was shooting the TV pilot for a period western that eventually
became a series. The director was a man named Rob Lieberman, someone
I had met while doing TV commercials. Rob is a director with a
strong visual sense and he is also very well organized. We had
a ridiculously short schedule for this project, something like
13 days, but we were determined to do something visually worthwhile.
So we developed a photographic style that we thought could be
interesting and would support the story, but would also allow
us to work very quickly. Basically, we just adapted a style that
we had been using on commercials; sort of a semi-documentary,
available light, hand-held or long lens approach and it worked
out great.

MM: You won an Oscar for your second film, Legends of the Fall. Your film career was still in its
relative infancy, yet you were awarded the top honor in your craft.
Was this an experience where you were able to realize and appreciate
your own success, or was it an achievement that was frightening
in that you knew you would have to live up to it on future projects?

JT: A bit of both, really. I honestly didn’t
expect to win and was surprised when I did. I remember leaving
the stage and looking at the Oscar and saying to myself ‘You just
won an Academy Award,’ like I needed to hear it to believe it.
I definitely appreciated the fact that I won, but I didn’t take
it for granted that it would necessarily guarantee anything in
the future. I probably thought about whether I could live up to
that accomplishment, but not for long because I was just about
to begin the color timing for Braveheart at the lab and
most of my energy was going into that. I was fortunate that I
was at the final stage of production on a picture and finishing
a project, rather than walking on to a set for the first day of
shooting and starting something from scratch.

MM: You’ve worked with some of the film
industry’s most celebrated directors, including Francis Ford Coppola,
Terrence Malick and Cameron Crowe. What did you learn from these
partnerships about the moviemaking process?

JT: I’ve learned something from every director
I’ve worked with. Quite often it was all positive, valuable knowledge
based on their past experience. Once in a while it was a good
lesson in what not to do because the results were less than we
had hoped for. But in my mind, great filmmaking is all one big
experiment. The best filmmakers are innovators and the best films
are made when motivated by a passion for a story and fueled by
creative intuition. Experience is certainly valuable, but not
the key ingredient. Most of the directors I have worked with have
aspired to do great work, and when it was great it was great because
they were exploring ideas that were new to them and allowed themselves
to be open.

MM: Describe your ideal director-cinematographer
collaboration: At what point would you begin working on the film?
At what point would the collaboration end?

JT: In my mind, once a cinematographer starts
working on a film and begins a collaboration with a director,
they should never actually stop being a part of that film, ever.
This is because cinematographers provide a unique function. Other
than the director, they are the only people on a film directly
involved with the visual content throughout the entire production
process. They essentially are the eyes of the film.

In pre-production, they work in collaboration with
a director and a production designer to help develop and design
a visual style for a project. During production, they work closely
with the director in planning and shooting individual sequences-actually
creating the imagery. And in postproduction, they participate
in supervising the final color correction of both the film prints
at laboratories and the digital masters at digital facilities.
This level of participation is essential because it is very important
that someone is there, beginning to end, to guarantee that the
visual intent of the project as originally conceived and executed
is what actually appears on the screen.

In the extreme, this involvement should extend even
as far as restoration of a film many years after an initial release.
Cinematographers know more than anyone about how their films are
supposed to look, even years after they have been released. The
cinematographer of E. T., Allen Daviau A.S.C., has just
finished the color timing of the film prints for that film’s re-release.
And as newer digital mastering technologies are introduced, cinematographers
are usually called to do new video transfers of films they photographed
years earlier.

MM: Do you prefer to have a lot of freedom
on the set, or do you prefer working with a director who has a
strong idea of what s/he wants?

 JT: Working with a director with strong
ideas can be a liberating experience for a cinematographer, provided
they have something in common to begin with. A director with strong
ideas who encourages collaboration will get the best from all
of the creative members of a crew because it gives them the freedom
to pursue ideas that are focused, and quite often the ideas are
improved in the process.

Going all the way back to D. W. Griffith and Billy
Bitzer, I think that the best films have been made through great
director/cinematographer collaborations and a good collaboration
will usually elevate the work of both the director and the cinematographer.
Some of the best examples of this are probably Orson Welles/Gregg
Toland, David Lean/Freddie Young, Richard Brooks/Conrad Hall,
Bernardo Bertolucci/Vittorio Storaro, Francis Coppola/Gordon Willis,
but there are many, many more.

MM: At what point do you like to come into
a film and begin your planning of the shots? Two of the most incredible
scenes in
Vanilla Sky are two that couldn’t be more different
in nature, but were probably equally hard, logistically, to create.
The first is the scene of an empty Times Square; the other is
the club scene, where Tom Cruise’s character, David, first goes
out with his mask. Can you talk a bit about the planning and execution
of these two scenes?

JT: I like to be involved in helping to design
an overall visual style, as well as shots for individual scenes,
as early as possible after agreeing to do a film. In the case
of Vanilla Sky, I had worked with director Cameron Crowe
on Almost Famous and he encouraged me to get involved in Vanilla Sky as early as possible. For a number of reasons,
none of them good, we actually had a very short period of time
to prep Vanilla Sky. So it all came together quickly, especially
Times Square. The contrast between the scene in Times Square and
the scene in the club is pretty interesting because we were looking
for both similarities and opposite extremes in both scenes.

Times Square was all about trying to put Tom’s character,
David Ames, into a surreal environment where he discovers himself
alone in one of the busiest cities in the world that has suddenly
become empty of people. In the nightclub, he finds himself alone
in a surreal environment in the middle of a crowded dance floor.
In the club he’s alone in a sea of people. In Times Square he’s
alone in an abandoned city.

Times Square was a pure exercise in planning and logistics
as much as cinematography. We received permission to shoot there
after much negotiation. We had tremendous cooperation from the
New York City Mayor’s Office and Lt. John Battista from the police
department. They wanted to help us as much as possible. However,
because of the difficulties in controlling Times Square and the
nature of the scene (there could be no traffic or pedestrians
visible between 48th and 39th Streets on
both Broadway and Seventh Avenue because we wanted to do a camera
move of at least 180 degrees), they were reluctant to encourage
us because they were afraid we wouldn’t be able to get the shots
we were planning.

They were politely saying that they would help us
as much as possible, but we were probably being overly optimistic.
Of course we imagined that what they were really thinking was
that we were out of our minds and we would never be able to get
the shots we were planning in the amount of time we had to do
it. They said they could get us two hours of traffic control,
between 7 and 9 on a Sunday morning, but after that they wouldn’t
be able to hold or control the traffic.

The idea of the main Times Square shot was to introduce
Tom Cruise as he drove into Times Square, the camera seeing north
of 44th Street, up a completely abandoned Broadway and Seventh
Avenue. The camera moves toward him as he gets out of the car
and into a close-up as he realizes NYC is abandoned. Then, as
he runs away down Broadway, the camera moves behind him and cranes
up to see an empty Broadway and Seventh Avenue south of 44th Street.
We planned to do this in one shot and with no CGI. In addition,
we needed several other shots of Tom in close-up running down
Seventh Avenue.

On the day, everything worked really well and we pulled
it off. Thanks to the NYPD and great support from our NY production
team we had exactly two hours to work in Times Square. The execution
of the shot required an enormous amount of coordination between
the grip department and our Steadicam operator, Larry McKonkey.
It had taken us half a day to design the shot and then half a
day to rehearse it with Tom. This had taken place in a parking
lot in Brooklyn while we were still in prep.

We had recreated the Times Square set in the parking
lot and spent the time there designing the shot, rather than trying
to do it in Times Square on the day of the shoot. It was complicated
because Larry had to start the shot walking toward Tom and the
car, move to the close up and then move behind Tom and step on
to a crane and get up in the air quickly before Tom began to run.
The crane had to move into position and meet Larry and the Steadicam
because it would have been visible in the first part of the shot,
so the timing was pretty tricky.

Key grips Herb Ault and Richie Guiness did great work
coordinating the crane move and it all worked. It was one of those
days when it was pretty exciting to be around because it was high
energy and all go. We knew that if we didn’t get it on that first
try we probably wouldn’t get a second chance. And it was such a
unique experience to be in the middle of Times Square and see it
abandoned. It actually was a little spooky.

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