Getting ‘Kinsey’ in proper focus

Frederick Elmes

Director of photography

Current projects: “Kinsey.”

Credits: David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart”; John Cassavetes’ “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” “Opening Night”; Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm,” “Ride With the Devil,” “The Hulk”; Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” “Night on Earth,” “Ten Minutes Older.”

Indie versus mainstream: “I like being able to do bigger films and smaller films; certainly my roots are smaller films. John Cassavetes made pretty small independent films by today’s standards, as did David Lynch, who is the other person I started with. I found that films of smaller budgets are often more interesting stories. They tend to be out of the ordinary, and that appeals to me.”

Making the call: “I went to [‘Kinsey’ writer-director] Bill Condon. We were on the jury of the Independent Feature Project one year. I had seen [Condon’s] ‘Gods and Monsters’ and really liked it and told him that. This film came around, and I heard about it and I called him out of the blue and said, ‘If you don’t have somebody, I’m really interested.’ I do [call] directors. I think it’s important to take that initiative to find out what’s out there and know the people you’d like to work with.

“Jim Jarmusch is somebody I didn’t call, but I saw his film ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ years before and said, ‘God, that is somebody I’d love to work with. Somebody who is really talented.’ You kind of make a note of a name and see what he does next and follow him. And then at some point, maybe your paths will cross.”

The colors of “Kinsey”: “Bill sent the script and I read it, and then we sat and talked about his ideas and what I might be able to bring to it. I see my job as principally trying to draw the director out, and in this case, because the director is the writer, it’s easier. He really has all of those ideas on the surface, and he’s been living with it for a couple of years. I try to ask all the right questions and figure out what he wants to do, not only visually but what’s important to him in the story.

“In the case of ‘Kinsey,’ the fact that the film takes place over three decades was important to build, so we found subtle ways to show the passage of time in the man’s life. It was changes in the color scheme, and that is certainly something we worked on with Richard Sherman, the production designer, and the costumer designer. We did it together. I don’t do this alone.”

Putting a career in focus: “I was a photography student. I went to school at Rochester [N.Y.] at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and before that I grew up as a self-taught still photographer who made home movies. After RIT, I went to New York University graduate film school. I learned a lot about dramatic feature filmmaking, and that is what interested me most. After NYU, I was lucky enough to get into the American Film Institute, which was my ticket to Los Angeles.”

Age: 57

Residence: Westchester, N.Y.

Union: Local 600. “It’s the Camera Guild, and it represents not only cinematographers but all camera workers and videographers and still photographers. It is a big local.”

Salary: “I don’t want to be specific. I am fortunate to be well paid because I am given a great deal of responsibility on a film. It is my responsibility to make sure not only the camera but the lighting and grip crew work correctly in a timely way. So it involves a lot of people and planning.”

Lessons of Lynch and Cassavetes: “They were very different. David is a painter who is completely controlling all the technical aspects of the film and wanted to be very sure of the light and the shadow [on ‘Eraserhead’], and he had a very, very particular notion of how it should look.

“John Cassavetes had absolutely no regard for technical things in filmmaking at all. He would just as soon not light [a scene] if he could. He hated the notion that a film should look glossy or in control. He wanted to give the actors leeway to do what they wanted. It was very difficult to get used to because I do like to control things like David.

“To be thrown in with John Cassavetes opened my eyes to a whole different approach to filmmaking -- a whole different way of looking at a story. I think I learned a great deal from John working on those two films. I learned about respect for the actors and allowing them the space to do what they needed to do in a scene.”