Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker

Work as much as you can.

I remember times when I worked until midnight on a music video, then slept for two hours, grabbed a cab across town and started another one at three in the morning. I’d catch a plane later that morning to shoot a commercial. 

Get educated.

Gabby [Beristain] and I taught each other, but I was mainly self-taught by studying paintings and other cinematographers’ works, including everything that Freddie Young, Nestor Almendros and Raoul Coutard did… and Vittorio Storaro’s work on The Conformist.

Be serious about comedy.

We had a great time doing Bulletproof. Some of the best scenes I’ve ever shot are in that movie. There is a chase sequence through thick woods in pea soup fog, which is really exciting. The producer kept saying, “Why are you guys going to all this trouble? This is a comedy.”

Film exists in two parallel worlds.

I’ve worked in two parallel worlds, worthy independent features and big-budget, studio comedies. One of the saddest and proudest days of my life was when I dropped my son off at Vassar when he was starting college. He told his roommate that his dad worked in Hollywood. The kid had never heard of any of my films. But, as I was leaving, they started watching a video of Half Baked, a very low-budget film I shot back in 1998 that has become kind of a cult favorite. 

It comes down to relationships.

A lot of it just comes down to relationships.

Resolve is everything.

What did Oscar Wilde say about that? It was something like marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. That’s what you have to do in your relationships with directors. You have got to say, ‘I’m going to stick with this no matter what. I’m committed to it and we’re going to see it through together.’

Examine your motivations.

I’ve learned that you have to constantly examine your own motivations and ask yourself what’s best for the movie and commit to making that work. I think if you help make the best possible film, it reflects the best on you. 

Understand the nature of cinema.

I don’t want to sound pretentious, but if you consider the nature of art, it is meant to give us a different set of eyes to see the world. I want audiences to respond viscerally. I think that cinematography works very much like music in that it is difficult for us to measure or quantify why audiences respond to what we do.