Cinematographer casts a long shadow

They are the oddest of couples: a sunny Hollywood storyteller with a strong sentimental streak and his director of photography, a master of shadows, beckoning him to the dark side.

Director Steven Spielberg dwells on beauty, Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s director of photography, said in a recent interview.

Kaminski, for his part, sees beauty in the bleak and the ugly.

“He is very much interested in classical beauty,” said Kaminski, 42, who first teamed up with Spielberg on “Schindler’s List,” which won both men Oscars, for cinematography and directing, as well as best picture honors.

“I see beauty in bleakness,” said Kaminski, who created the stark and at times startling black-and-white palette of the Holocaust drama.

Working with Spielberg, whom he calls the “ultimate director,” Kaminski has cast the shadows that permeate the Hollywood director’s last seven movies, including “Catch Me If You Can,” a comedy that opened on Christmas Day.

The cameraman wants to present the audience with a “real” world, and he says Spielberg understands.

“He has just mellowed out so much,” Kaminski said.

Kaminski chose the strong lights that cast the dark shadows of Spielberg’s “Minority Report” and also did the lighting for “Saving Private Ryan” and “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.”

“If it is required to go a little bit ugly, I’ll go ugly,” Kaminski says.

Directors of photography are often said to “paint with light.” They design the look of films and collaborate with the directors on shifting focus, jobs that requires technical skill and have tremendous artistic effect.

Kaminski describes “Catch Me If You Can” as “champagne,” a bubbly caper movie, although after his first viewing of the completed film, he agreed there was a somber side to it.

An FBI agent played by Tom Hanks tracks down a masterful con man played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and the two develop an unlikely friendship.

The FBI agent and the check forger are both lonely figures on a chase that takes them through a lush 1960s world that Kaminski calls funky and quirky.

But Kaminski also created the unflattering, bleached-out look of the FBI office where Hanks’ character works.

“You get this naive character such as Tom Hanks’ in this kind of an ugly, ugly environment to emphasize his innocence, to emphasize his naivete,” Kaminski said. “I’m attracted to ugliness for the sake of beauty.”

Kaminski grew up in Poland on a cultural diet of American music and such films as “The Graduate” and the dark comedy “Harold and Maude.”

However, he took up filmmaking as a profession at Columbia College in Chicago only after immigrating to the United States when he was 21.

He credits growing up in Eastern Europe, dominated by the Soviet Union at the time, for tuning his artistic sensibility and interest in the beauty of bleakness.