Teraz mogę po prostu być starym człowiekiem – wywiad z MICHAELEM CHAPMANEM (Camerimage 2016)

During this year’s edition of the Camerimage Festival the Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to 81-year-old Michal Chapman, American cameraman and cinematographer, two-time Oscar nominee director of photography responsible for shooting fantastic films of  Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, Taxi Driver) and popular pictures from the 90’s (Lost Boys, Ghostbusters II). The noble recipient devoted a few minutes of his time to answer our questions.

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Congratulations on receiving the Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award. I wonder how it feels to be recognized in this way almost a decade after retiring.

Oh, it feels lovely, I am really honored and flattered to get this award. To me it has this wonderful climactic feeling – it is as though I were finally told: “Everything is ok. Your career is over, you’ve done a lot of things right and now you can just go and be an old man” (laughs). But I mean that in a good way – there is a kind of finality to it and what better place there is for a cinematographer to receive such award than Camerimage?

I can imagine that every time you receive an award for your work you have been grateful to your father-in-law.

Well yes, my first wife’s father was a French émigré cameraman who escaped the Nazis and got to New York, where he had a very good career and got me into the business. Yes, I owe Joe Brun a lot.

You made your last movie, Bridge to Terabithia, in 2007. Have you ever regretted retiring?

No, absolutely not. I couldn’t do the hours anymore – it’s as simple as that. Fourteen, fifteen hours when you’re 70 years old it’s just not something you want to think about. In fact, the last two movies I made – Bridge to Terabithia and Hoot – were children movies, because they do not require the same amount of hours. Labor laws of the state of California say that children cannot work fifteen hours a day, so with children movies I was able to keep up. And I always had this “hands on” approach to work, I had to check everything myself, so I simply got worn out after some time.

Did any of your director friends try to talk you into trying one more time?

Yeah, Phil Kaufman and some other directors tried, but they were mostly old men too, so they understood my decision (laughs). I just quit, respectfully, but actually Bridge to Terabithia was a wonderful movie to go out on.

In the beginning of your career as a cinematographer, you worked as camera operator at the set of such masterpieces as The Godfather or Jaws. How did it help you in establishing yourself as director of photography?

Oh, it helped in a lot of ways! When you’re the operator, looking through the camera and seeing what’s happening, you are the very first person to do that. There is no better position to study what works and what doesn’t, how really good directors round up shots and you can see that before anybody else can. You say “Oh my God, look at that: we dollied here and we were able to catch that, and it’s wonderful” or “We didn’t dolly there, so we didn’t catch that and it isn’t so wonderful”. You get to judge what’s going on better than anybody else, because you are looking right at it and it’s really, really useful.

It seems that you have to be the camera operator first to be a great cinematographer.

In fact, after I became a DP I tried to operate my own movies anyway, because I could see some much better what is going on, what the lighting was that night and think “oh fuck, I should’ve done that differently” and so on. I can’t express it enough how wonderful it is to see everything better than anyone on the set – the director, the DP – because you’re only seeing what the camera seeing. You’re “the eye” and that’s very important.

One of the first big movies you made was “Taxi Driver”. How did your cooperation with Martin Scorsese start?

Martin came to New York to do this movie. He had very little money, so he couldn’t bring a Hollywood crew – because unions wouldn’t allow it and he had no budget for that – and had to hire people from New York. He had to find a cameraman who was from New York and wasn’t terribly expensive. And I wasn’t (laughs). He must’ve met many candidates, but he and I hit it off. We both admired Jean-Luc Godard and I probably had a more sophisticated view of movies than most of the other cameramen he met. By then I shot The Last Detail and The White Dawn, so Martin knew what I am capable of. The Last Detail was actually quite a good introduction to Taxi Driver – they both have this documentary feeling and have the “life on the streets” theme.

Back then Martin Scorsese was not that much established as a director. Did you feel you were doing something extraordinary, that the movie will be a success?

Well, I am not sure I remember such feeling, but I did know that the script is simply wonderful. That’s what makes this movie great – extraordinary script. I remembering saying to a friend that you didn’t necessary understand how great the script was until you came to shoot it. When we started shooting I realized how much it gave me, told me about what to look at. I knew that this feeling was wonderful, but if the movie is going to be a success – you never know.

During your career you tended to choose projects which were more dynamic, involved shooting in narrow spaces and with a lot of interaction between characters. I hear that often you had to improvise cinematographical solutions while on set in order to meet the expectations of the director or the reality of the location. Which of your projects was most difficult to shoot?

The most difficult in terms of the reality of the location was definitely The White Dawn, which was shot in the Arctic. We lived among the Inuit and it was physically very, very demanding. I was sorry that it was not showing here at Camerimage – I tried to make it happen, but somehow it failed. I happened to see it just recently and I forgot how wonderful, exotic and sympathetic to the Inuit the movie is. It brought back all sorts of memories. That was certainly the most demanding picture I made and we had to constantly improvise just to make sure we all don’t freeze to death (laughs). One time a dog run away with the sled carrying a camera on it, so such things happened.

Would you say that The White Dawn is the best film for someone who would like to get to know the Michael Chapman’s style of shooting? Is it your most representative piece of work?

The film is definitely underrated, as are Philip Kaufman’s works in general. But I think The Last Detail is the picture you would need to see first – it’s the most primitive, but it is also a piece of work of a young man terrified of screwing up (laughs). I would see these two in order – The Last Detail and The White Dawn. I think that it was during shooting The White Dawn when I began to realize that cinematography is the art form for me and I will spend most of my life doing it.