Ed Lachman in conversation with Sean Price Williams
The Metrograph Interview
Ed Lachman in conversation with Sean Price Williams
The Metrograph Interview
BY
Sean Price Williams
A playful, wide-ranging conversation with veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman.
Veteran cinematographer and director Ed Lachman stopped by Metrograph to screen his 1990 Lou Reed/John Cale concert film Songs for Drella, and beforehand sat down to dinner at the Commissary with cinematographer Sean Price Williams, with Metrograph Journal’s editor-at-large Nick Pinkerton on hand as an awed witness.
A discussion of their individual early apprenticeship periods with the Maysles brothers, decades apart, opened into a wide-ranging discussion of documentary and narrative camerawork, the approaches of great DPs of past generations, getting dosed while shooting the Grateful Dead, and the importance of subjective human presence behind the camera. Sean and Nick had steaks, medium rare; Mr. Lachman had the duck course. Sean drank several Iguanas. Nick had approximately 15 Old Fashioneds. Mr. Lachman had Chamomile Lavender tea.
SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS: When did you start with the Maysles?
ED LACHMAN: Right out of college. I did my thesis film about this therapeutic community, and I lived there for three months. They all said I should live there. Then I went to the Maysles’ [office on 54th St. and Broadway], because they had editing rooms [that other filmmakers could use], and that was the first time I was ever around the Steenbeck. So it was like I was living in the editing room.
Al [Albert Maysles] got curious and he came in one morning, and said, “What are you doing here?” I go, “Well, I shot it, I’m syncing it up. I was editing it. I did everything, you know?” We became friends out of that, because he was surprised. I was a cameraman, but then I ended up being a sound man for him, and then he let me do second camera.
SPW: What was this place, where you were living?
EL: Odyssey House was a therapeutic community for addicts. It was downtown, off A Street or whatever. It was actually going to be a film that was for fundraising, to get people to invest in their program. People lived there, and so I said, “Well, if I do a film like this”—because that was the cinéma verité days back then, obviously—“I’ll live in the facility with the addicts.”
SPW: Method filmmaking. So you were definitely devoted to “Second Cinema” already, no interest in becoming a Hollywood camera?
EL: I was always more New York-based, you know? In fact, when I got my break and I did Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), I could never tell Al. When he asked me, I said, “Oh, it’s a documentary about this musical artist, Madonna.” I never could admit to him that I was shooting a narrative film. Because Al’s rap was always whatever you can find in a narrative, you could find in life, so why do you have to shoot a narrative? But it was a great experience, you worked with him to watch how he shot. His zoom lens was like a microscope. He would always be right there, because his background was psychology, I think he had a degree. And so he would always be in the moment with a subject.
So that was the greatest, working with Al in the documentary area, and then later I worked with Robbie Müller when he shot The American Friend (1977), and then I worked with him with Peter Bogdanovich. And so from him I worked with Sven Nykvist, and then after that was [Vittorio] Storaro.
SPW: What did you do with Storaro?
EL: I did La Luna (1979). When Bertolucci came to New York, I did the New York stuff… So that was the best film school I could have had, to work with those cinematographers. Because it wasn’t just the technical end, but I also learned kind of their demeanor, how they dealt with the director, the crew. And also they each had their own aesthetic of how they worked with light. I always said Robbie liked to work off of what was available. He would use ND gels so the fluorescence wouldn’t burn out in the background, and he would shoot wide open. And then we go from here to Sven, and Sven was always like… “I make it pretty,” he would say. But also he was a minimalist; he would work with like a 2K Softlite where another guy would use a 10, he wasn’t afraid. And he was a great operator, but it was the simplicity of his lighting. And then Storaro had his own fingerprint. He created his light wherever he was.
SPW: And then, on your next film, are you imitating these guys a little bit? Are you trying stuff out?
EL: I think I stole or appropriated from everybody on what I could understand. Like, I still film film negative. I still work with a Pentax Spotmeter V—that’s what’s Sven used to work with—because I just learned how to use that meter… And everyone thought of exposure in a different way, it was interesting for sure.
SPW: I really wish I’d seen Al shooting film. When I was with him, already he was shooting MiniDV and whatever cameras Sony was giving him.
EL: Al had a Spectra [meter] on the camera. And it was just whatever the light was. He didn’t think about light as an emotional feeling. It was like: “Do I have exposure to shoot?” Which was great, that’s what he was about. It was always the aesthetics of the framing, it was about capturing the moment, you know?
SPW: And those guys all have very different perspectives. When you watch the concert movies that they worked on together, I can tell, “That’s Pennebaker’s shot. That’s Al’s shot.” Often Al’s shots are because there’s a pretty girl or, like, there’s Ravi Shankar’s feet in Monterey Pop (1968). I feel like that’s Al, for sure.
EL: I remember the last five days of The Grateful Dead (1977), we were in San Francisco. And they had spiked the water—well, actually, the ice that the drinks were in—and we all got hit with LSD. And Al was on the stage and shot roll after roll of this girl on the stage dancing.
SPW: Yeah, he described that experience as that he was on the stage floor, on his belly like a baby, filming… Whenever anybody would ask him, “You know, Al, you were hanging out with all these cool rock stars and everything, you must have had your drug periods?” He said that was really his only memory of doing drugs.
“I DIDN’T CLAIM TO BE DOING THIS [MOVIE] OUT OF SOME ALTRUISTIC MOTIVE. I THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD STORY, AND I WAS VERY PRIVILEGED TO BE ALLOWED TO TELL IT.”
EL: Now here’s a question I should ask you. I worked on Grey Gardens (1975). The Maysles had me come out because they were upset that they were relating to [their subjects, Big Edie and Little Edie]. You know, they were from the strict vérité school that no one should converse, they should be the fly on the wall.
SPW: Plus Little Edie was kind of in love with David, so that was maybe…
EL: When I arrived, she came out with a scarf over her head: “Oh, another cameraman,” then went upstairs. And there were about 20 cats licking a block of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. I clearly remember it. She gave me a spoon and asked would I like some ice cream? Anyway, so they had me shoot them shooting Big and Little Edie. But I realised the relationship between Al and Dave was similar to their relationship. So there was a scene where Big and Little Edie are in the bedroom, and then I pan out to the hallway and there’s Al and Dave in a discussion. And they saw that footage and they go, “Hmmm. I don’t think we should have another point of view in the film.” But no one’s ever found that footage…
SPW: Wouldn’t you say that David, though he’s the younger brother, was more like Big Edie?
EL: Al was certainly the serious one. But David kind of ran the show, right? I mean, David was in the editing room, he’s doing the sound; Al just cared about the shooting. Al would look at the cut, but he was just into the Zen moment of shooting.
SPW: For sure. And he directed that way. I mean, this is the thing that is always kind of irritating when people talk about documentaries as being made in the edit. It’s true to a point, but Al very deliberately is shooting the point of view of that guy directing in that moment.
EL: It’s always about… The shooting is a subjective viewpoint. What you choose to shoot is directing what you’re seeing. Of course, you can manipulate that depending on how you organize it, but that’s the difference between a documentary that’s interestingly shot and one that’s not: the point of view.
That brings up another interesting point, because when people talk to me about documentary and narrative, I say all films are documentaries, or documents. No shot is ever the same in a narrative film—the timing of the shot, the performance. And in fact, I try to work off of the moment all the time in a narrative.
In fact, I would say Todd [Haynes] has gotten more and more… Like we shoot a lot of two cameras now and, you know, he goes in with a shooting plan—he does his homework, he does the shooting schedule for the whole film—but when we’re in the set, in the moment, he’ll work off of what’s happening. And to me, there’s an authenticity to the story in the images. It’s so funny, like when there’s an accident or there’s something out of focus, he always uses that in the edit. I think he feels that brings some credibility to what you’re looking at.
SPW: Yeah. I know Scorsese really likes little mistakes in dolly moves and things like that; he hates it when somebody tries to fix it in post and they take a little jiggle out or something, it makes him crazy.
EL: In the documentary I did with Wim [Wenders], Tokyo-Ga (1985), about Ozu, we’re interviewing the cameraman, Yûharu Atsuta, and he starts to cry. Because he only works with Ozu. And I took the camera off of him, I was kind of embarrassed for him. And then I go no, I can’t do that, and then I moved it back onto him. And they left it in the cut, and you feel the emotion of what he’s feeling, or what I’m feeling.
To me, that’s partly what we do as imagemakers, we invest. So that’s why I respond to an artist like Robert Frank, or at one time Larry Clark, was because you always felt their presence in the image.
SPW: Yeah, this is a big thing. The importance, if at all, of feeling the people behind the camera, and in these movies. I think it’s something that people are more and more interested in—I hope, I don’t know.
NICK PINKERTON: A couple of weeks ago, my friend and I were talking about Aretha Franklin—she’s a big Aretha Franklin fan, I never really listened to her. But I thought I’d take a shot, and I downloaded that long-unedited Sydney Pollack-directed Franklin concert film, Amazing Grace. And I got maybe 10 minutes in, and it’s very much a Sydney Pollack movie, all perfunctory, locked-down coverage, and a total impersonality, a total lack of response to what’s going on on the stage. And I’m going out of my mind, I have to take this off. I have to watch Depeche Mode: 101 (1989) instead.
SPW: Yeah, right, Depeche Mode: 101, the Pennebaker documentary. That was shot by that couple [Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines] who made Seventeen (1983) … Or even to see Shirley Clark’s Ornette Coleman documentary. There’s some crazy decisions in her filmmaking that make it feel like there’s someone behind there, it’s not just a reportage. And since we’ve had the luxury of knowing Al, so it’s so fun to watch those movies thinking about him behind there. But if you don’t know the person… I still don’t know if it’s of value to have that kind of personality in a movie.
EL: I mean, what makes their films so personal? You don’t have to understand that that was Al, but you feel the personality of Salesman (1969), you really emotionally feel those characters. Whereas if it was done with someone different…
SPW: Yeah. I don’t like gimbals. I don’t like anything that cameras mount onto that have an unnatural feeling.
EL: Well, now they steady, now they stabilize!
SPW: Laughs. There will be a reaction to that. They’re going to like our unstable images again, I know that. I hope.
SPW: An interesting film within the Maysles world that I think really shows the difference of editing as a camera man and editing as editors is what they did with The Gates (2007). Because they shot a lot of that in 1979, and then they came back and filmed it when [the site-specific art project] actually happened. And what they filmed in ’79 is Al directing, and all that footage, you feel it, it’s edited in camera. And then when they had 500 cameras rolling in 2004 or 2005, it’s just a collection of images edited together. So it’s a very clear contrast of these types of documentary filming. Anyway, I just know I’ve had to defend myself as far as whether documentaries are completely an editor’s game or not. It’s annoying.
EL: Oh no, that’s silly. It’s about point of view. The point of view begins with the camera. Because the director will always be late, like even in a concert, like let’s say when I did [the Chuck Berry concert film] Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll (1987). A big Hollywood guy directed it, Taylor Hackford. And they wanted the cameramen to wear earphones, and they were going to tell you where to be when. Well, you’re always behind. You have to be in the moment. So I said to Taylor, “Why don’t I go into the dressing room? It would be much more interesting to have somebody in the dressing room between the songs.” So I was in Chuck Berry’s dressing room. There I am with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger…
SPW: Is that 16 millimeter?
EL: Yeah! And it was the best stuff in the film. Because they were totally relaxed. And I was just hanging out in the corner, and shooting. I didn’t even have my headset.
SPW: Yeah, it’s always interesting what we can get away with. People get surprised that the cameraman doesn’t always upset the reality—especially with entertainers like that, you can really be very invisible. But I am always still impressed by Wiseman films and things like that, the things that have happen naturally in front of the camera. It’s pretty shocking.
Actually, I went through a lot of the Salesman outtakes while I was working there just to see how many times, you know, there’s a woman at home at two in the afternoon who opens her door—and there’s a guy with a Bible, and Al Maysles with this giant camera, and David Maysles with this new microphone that he just got that’s about four-feet long, pointed at her—and eight times out of 10 the woman doesn’t seem to notice! It’s not what she’s looking at, it’s really amazing.
EL: But even now, people are around cameras all the time, so they’re more relaxed about it. Like when I did Ken Park (2002) with Larry [Clark], we were in people’s homes, I mean, I was in the bedroom with these kids and their parents didn’t think anything of it?! I thought “Whoa, this is weird. A 50-year-old guy’s in there with his 18-year-old kid in his bedroom with a camera, and they don’t say anything?”
SPW: If they’d researched Larry, they might have… Laughs. If they’d taken a very brief internet ride… You know, people always want to talk about how you got started. I mean, I’m nobody, but I’ll still get asked: “How did you get into the New York Film Scene?” Like, what does that mean? As if there was some community that I slipped into and it made my life wonderful.
EL: Well every time has its own grammar, you know?
NP: But it is an interesting one. I went to film school, and everyone I went to film school with went to LA. I’m the only one who went to New York, and Ed, you’ve always stayed put here…
SPW: Yeah, yeah. I’m curious about that, your devotion to New York.
EL: Well, I think my connection to New York was that it was closer to Europe, because I was more interested in European cinema than I was Hollywood cinema. So even the European directors I met were really through New York; I met Werner Herzog in Berlin but I met Bertolucci at the New York Film Festival.
SPW: How did that happen?
EL: Well, the crazy thing was, I was at Ohio University then, and this film came in, Before The Revolution (1964), and I didn’t understand it but it was the first film I saw where something about it really bothered me. I saw it about a dozen times. So I decided I would do my thesis on it. You know, it’s about this young guy who can’t resolve his leftist beliefs because he’s bourgeoisie and blah blah blah—and it’s Bernardo, really.
My mother was good friends with the stage manager who was also the head of publicity at Paramount Pictures, Bill Kenly. Over the vacation period of spring break, they would let me go to the press screenings, and I would sit in the booth in the back where the projectionist was. And so I’d always ask Bill, “Who’s coming this year to show their films?” Because back then, the directors always came from Europe to do a Q&A at the press screenings. He said “Oh, there’s this young director from Italy, I don’t know… Bernardo Bertolucci. He’s coming with two films, The Spider’s Stratagem (1970) and The Conformist (1970).” “Whoa!” I said, “I’m doing my thesis on Bernardo Bertolucci.” So at the press screening afterward, I go up to Bernardo—and he didn’t speak much English, I spoke a little French— and I told him I was doing my thesis on Before the Revolution, and he couldn’t believe it.
SPW: He was also probably what, like, 28 at the time?
EL: He called me his first American groupie. So that night, or the next night, there was a party, and he was there with Clare, who he eventually married, Clare Peploe. He invited me, and he said, “Would you like to sit in the box when I show the films?” So I sat in his box when he showed The Conformist. He turned to me and said, “What do you think?” and I nearly fell out of the box! And that was my relationship with Bernardo. And then when they came to New York to shoot La Luna, Storaro needed a standby DP because he wasn’t in the union, and then they had me do second unit. And so that’s how, way back… Everything in life is kind of cyclical, so about four years ago I did a poster with JR for the New York Film Festival. And I had the eyes—you know JR, the artist? He uses eyes.
NP: Yeah, from the Varda film [Faces Places, 2017].
EL: Yeah. He’s a friend, and we did we did the poster—the Festival always give an artist the opportunity to do the poster. My idea was to use eyes of directors in an alleyway, and it was JR’s idea was to use a New York alleyway. And there were just eyes all over the background in this alleyway, and in the center I put Bernardo’s eyes. And somebody sent him a photo. About a week before he died, he wrote me a note, I still have it. That was like the complete circle. You know, he was very complimentary. He was like, “I always knew you would move forward. I always saw something in you.” Anyway, so that was really nice.
NP: You were a painting major at Ohio University, right?
EL: Yeah, yeah, I was in studio art, they called it, and art history, in the art department. I studied painting. The whole thing with painting, though, was that you had to be so isolated. And I always loved the idea of collaborating with people. I can remember that as a kid I used to like hanging out where people would build houses, like construction crews, because I just liked the comradeship of people doing something. And so when I picked up a Super 8 camera, I started to make these little films, portraits of people—but I always thought about painters when I made them because I had that background, not the film school one. People liked the way they looked so they would say to me, “Hey, will you shoot for me?” And that’s how I became a cameraman. But the thing about painting was that I knew it took so many years to develop your own style and the technique. And I was always interested in the found image— actually, the period of painters that I liked was like the Dadaists, and then later German Expressionism. So I felt that by picking up a camera I could translate that inclination to stylized portraiture into a photographic image, and tell a story more easily, than I could in front a blank canvas.
NP: A lot of interesting people seem to have been around O.U. close to the time you were there: Tony Buba, the Hong Kong director Ronny Yu, who made The Bride with White Hair (1993)… and then Joseph L. Anderson, who made Spring Night, Summer Night (1967), was teaching there.
EL: Are you from Ohio?
NP: Cincinnati.
EL: Yeah, yeah. I’m in Cincinnati all the time lately. We shot Carol (2015) and Dark Waters (2019) there. I always stay at the 21c hotel downtown. There are some good restaurants there.
NP: You make very good use of Maury’s Tiny Cove in Delhi in Carol, which is much less sleek and cosmopolitan in real life than it is in the movie. And I almost fell out of my seat when I saw Dark Waters. The Benihana where one of the final scenes takes place is the one by Tri-County Mall where I took my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day in 1999, and here you have it looking like a damn Ozu pillow shot.
SPW: Ohio stuff.
NP: There’s an interesting relationship between cinematographers and painting, though. Sean, for example, is a recent Whistler obsessive.
SPW: I’ve been looking at Whistler paintings, not... Laughs.
NP: There’s also that documentary about Jack Cardiff from some years back where they shoot him going to the National Gallery to look at Turner paintings.
EL: It should make sense. Honestly, when I did Desperately Seeking Susan, some of the crew said, “Why is the night green and yellow and orange?” I said, “Well it’s fluorescent, I’m just taking it further… and the yellow orange is tungsten, I’m just pushing it.” That all came out of my thinking about German Expressionism, using colors to evoke emotions that weren’t naturalistic but expressionistic, they were just pushed further. I had the background that allowed me to think about images like that, to think you could photograph things in a similar way. That was way before MTV; now everybody uses color. See, I never thought color had to be just decorative. If you go back to Goethe or Joseph Albers, they use color on a psychological level. They understood how color, even in Pop Art, it advances and recedes; how it could create form, and also how people respond to color psychologically. So I thought you could do that in cinema.
SPW: Do you believe that there’s a system for that? Storaro has a very rigid philosophy of color: this kind of yellow means this.
EL: Yeah, but here’s the problem. I don’t think you can think about color in symbols. People don’t relate to color as a symbol. He’s using color symbolically. I think you use color as a psychological element, you know? Why do you think hospitals are green? Or blue? Because it’s a more restful color. Why are restaurants yellow and red? Because they’ve done studies, they know that it helps appetite. So they’ve done so many studies for hundreds of years.
SPW: When I see green I associate it with the hospital, so I get nervous. It definitely can’t be the same for everybody, or maybe it changes between generations…
EL: I’m just saying I think of color as a psychological effect more than I do as a symbol. Because Storaro’s symbol is different than somebody else’s symbol, you know? So if he wants everybody to think that yellow is father and blue is mother, great!
SPW: I’m now imagining when you were hired to do second unit stuff for La Luna that there was like an instruction manual given to you.
EL: Oh no, no.
SPW: Because I did some stuff for Terrence Malick for a documentary, but I was remote, I was in New York shooting Occupy Wall Street stuff, and I got a page from him with his list of rules, which basically made it so that I couldn’t get anything… It was like: I had to use this one lens; I had to be against the light; I had to be at a certain height, you know? Meanwhile, I’m just trying to shoot protests and things, and I couldn’t get close… It was counter to everything I would have done to actually get the moment. Dogmas and rules might work for some people, but these things have to be flexible.
And directors are always late. When I’ve shot with Abel Ferrara, when he’s directing documentary style, every time he’s telling me, “You’ve got to get this.” I tell him, “I already got that, a minute ago. Now I’m missing this.” You know, it gets very frustrating.
EL: Yeah in documentaries, you got to let it happen. Directors don’t understand that what they see, by the time they see it, you have to be seeing it at the same time, you can’t see it after they’ve seen it.
"it all came out of my thinking about German Expressionism, using colors to evoke emotions that weren’t naturalistic but expressionistic, they were just pushed further. I had the background that allowed me to think about images like that, to think you could photograph things in a similar way. That was way before MTV; now everybody uses color."
SPW: Do you still like shooting concerts?
EL: Yeah, that was a natural. Like, tonight we’re going to show Songs for Drella. The thing about that film is that, because I was wearing the director’s hat, I could then do what I’d always wanted to do for a performance, which is match the rhythm of the music with the camera. And I was even luckier because I shot rehearsals, because when I met Lou [Reed]—I was hired by Channel Four, but obviously I had to go through Lou and John Cale for their approval. And in the first meeting I had with Lou, he said, “I don’t want any cameras between me and the audience. I’m here for the audience.” And the performance was at BAM. I said, “Alright,” but I went away and I thought, ”How the fuck am I going to shoot this if I can’t have any cameras between him and the audience? They’re all going to have to be so far away.” So I came back the next day and said, “Well, can I shoot the rehearsals? And it will just be me. And all I ask you is that you wear what you wear the night of the shoot.” And he agreed to it. Well that gave me the greatest freedom I ever could have. So then I set up dolly track, I shot in this empty theater, and I never showed an audience. That gave me the idea that I could be much more intimate with him than I ever could be in the performance with an audience, and it then developed into something else, it was a much more personal look.
SPW: It’s a great gift that you did that. When I saw it at the New York Film Festival on that big screen, and with the clarity of the image now, it really was very personal, in his very personal space, and he felt very present. And that will happen again tonight.
EL: And you see something between them. Another thing I didn’t realize—a lot of times we do things and you don’t really know if it works or not, or what it is that you did. The first audience is always the audience who is going to see it. Like you say, it’s so intimate; you don’t feel like you’re at somebody else’s concert, you feel like that concert is live.
SPW: Because it’s for us.
EL: It was lucky… I was just being thrown to the wind. Again, having the rehearsal, I could change some things that I never could have done. Because you know, we’re always thrown to the wind because the stage manager and the stage lighting person, they never want a cameraman to come in and change anything. But I could modify things slightly.
And then being in the DI [digital intermediate], I could even change some of the color. I could enrich certain things.
SPW: Are you still in touch with Cale at all?
EL: Well we interviewed him for The Velvet Underground (2021), but that was the first time I had seen in him in a long time.
SPW: I saw Cale like four years ago when he did some shows at BAM. He’s a hero of mine. He looks great in the documentary. Everybody looks so good. I think I’ve told you this already, but you did such a beautiful job lighting them all, all these old folks looking beautiful… Are you still playing around with Drella, though?
EL: When I look at it tonight, that’s the last color run. But I did go before tonight, I went back in there. Laughs.
NP: We’ll hand you some notes after the screening.
SPW: Yeah, yeah, I’ll let you know if I think anything is off.
EL: Well, you always look at every shot, you know? Films aren’t finished, but abandoned.
