ASC president Michael Goi on the society’s outreach to students, starting out with 8mm in Chicago, digital cameras and advice for new cinematographers.
Michael Goi, ASC has been chosen by his peers to serve as president of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC).
StudentFilmmakers magazine had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Michael Goi, ASC in an exclusive interview where Goi talks about the direction of the ASC and how the ASC offers outreach to both students and emerging cinematographers. Goi shares his insights on the digital revolution, technology, and where he sees the industry going. He also gives advice to filmmakers. StudentFilmmakers Magazine:
How are things there at the ASC?
Michael Goi, ASC: They’re fine.
SF: Were you ready for this? Did you have an idea that you were going to be the next president? What kinds of things happen when you’re the president, and what are your duties?
Michael Goi, ASC: I was first Vice President for three years so whenever Daryn Okada, ASC, who was president for the last three years, was out of town or otherwise occupied I would take care of administrative duties for him and interact with the membership and things that we had going on in terms of programs, dinner meetings, and interaction also with groups. We always have student groups coming here to talk with the ASC members. Especially during the summer, there’s always a lot of seminars and things like Cine Gear that we appear at.
SF: In regards to the direction of the ASC, what kinds of things do you see the ASC doing for student filmmakers in the future – or currently doing now? Is there anything coming up on the horizon that we would want to know about or tell students about?
Michael Goi, ASC: George Spiro Dibie is the Chair of the PR committee of the ASC. He is the person who organizes seminars for students. We’re always having students visit, and we round up a bunch of ASC members so they can have some one-on-one interaction with them. Also, we’re in the planning stages of now doing some ASC lighting seminars where they can come in and watch the ASC cinematographers actually light sets and explain what it is that they do and why they do it that way. There are other things that we’re in the works with in right now. I don’t want to go into too many details, but we figured that there should be, not just for students, but for emerging cinematographers in general, a way to access the membership and to access information that’s important to students and young filmmakers who want to be cinematographers. So I think we’re looking to develop those relationships more heavily through our website.
SF: So let’s talk a little bit about you. How did you get started in cinematography? Where was your start? Where did you discover the interest that you have and start to explore cinematography?
Michael Goi, ASC: Well, I was born and raised in Chicago, and I went to a friend’s birthday party when I was seven years old. And he was showing 8mm films of Frankenstein and Dracula on the living room wall. And that was the first time I had actually seen motion picture film. It was 8mm, and he had a small projector. But that was the first time I saw a strip of film with the frames on it and how the individual photos became motion pictures when they went through the projector. And that little bit of magic really kind of hooked me up.
I got an 8mm camera myself when I was eight years old and started making movies, and eventually bought a 16mm Bolex when I was fourteen – I used one so I can start to make more professional movies as I got into high school.
But I was always shooting. I always had the passion for shooting. My parents always told me, this is America and you’re an American, and you can be anything you wanna be. So I declared fairly early that I wanted to go to Hollywood and make movies.
I started actually shooting professional commercials while I was in high school. Because shooting my personal movies in 16mm was so expensive, I needed to make money somehow, and I ran across a Spanish aluminum siding company out on the street, and I recognized the name of the company because they had the worst commercials on Spanish television. It was just like still photos with narration, and they were really bad. So I grabbed my Bolex and a hundred feet of black-and-white film, and I went out there, and I shot their workers grabbing the aluminum siding and nailing it up on the house and stuff. And then I called the number on the side of the truck, and I told the guy who owned the company, I said, ‘I just shot your next television commercial.’ He said, ‘Really?’ So he met me down town, and we processed the film. And there was like a dozen shots of his workers putting up the siding. And he paid me $500 bucks, and he cut it into a 30-second spot. Put narration underneath it.
So, every weekend after that, I would grab my friends from high school, and we would go around and find small businesses to do commercials for. And those commercials financed my personal projects. This was in high school. I was like 14, 15 years old when I started doing that.
So, by the time I got into college – I went to Columbia College in Chicago – by the time I got to college, I already had 12 television commercials on the air.
SF: Are there things that you can think of that you might want to say or to tell us about the ASC or about yourself or filmmaking, or advice you would give young filmmakers?
Michael Goi, ASC: Well, the ASC – for anyone who is a cinematographer or wants to be a cinematographer, being a member of the ASC is certainly one of the high points that you could achieve. It’s the ultimate validation by your peers that you have achieved the level of artistry and commitment to your craft that is required. And as an ASC member, once you’re accepted – and it’s very difficult to be accepted – we only have 310 active members, active cinematographers who are members, and so it’s a very small club – you never lose that feeling, that feeling of just, an awe-struck feeling. Because all of a sudden all of your heroes, the people who shot the great movies that you watched as you developed as a cinematographer become your friends. And the interchange of ideas, the freedom with which you can discuss anything with them, and they with you, is really quite unique in this business.
I don’t know of any other craft in this business where the people regularly get together and exchange so much information and personal experiences. I remember the first time Caleb Deschanel called me to ask me for advice on crew in South Africa. I had done a movie in South Africa, and he hadn’t yet. I had to stop and think, wow, Caleb Deschanel was calling me to ask about crew.
It’s just really great, it’s a great organization. And it does a lot of good, did a lot of outreach, not just with students but to the entire industry. Last night we just had a big presentation of camera assessments, digital motion picture cameras, which was a massive thing, and it required 200 people in a shoot at Universal Studios in January. And we partnered with the Producers Guild to do this because there is so much misinformation digital cameras and about trying to figure out the workflow for digital cameras for motion picture use. We undertook to do this, and the results are just great. We do all these things and we release all this information to the industry so they can benefit from it.
SF: When an ASC member that’s been a cinematographer for some time, even though he has experienced and he has reached that achievement and recognition by his peers, now he all of a sudden he has this vast, long resource information and knowledge that accumulated, that the ASC members have and retained in their membership there, right?
Michael Goi, ASC: Yes.
SF: And like you said, when Caleb Deschanel called you. I always imagined if somebody wanted to light a street and they had never done it before, there’s someone there at the ASC that they can call and ask, ‘hey, I’m over here at 5th Avenue, we had to light 5th Avenue for this project, and I’m gonna use these kinds of lights,’ or ‘this is what I’m planning, and you had worked on something like this before, what would you recommend?’ And you support each other in those kinds of ways, right?
Michael Goi, ASC: Oh yeah, and it goes even beyond supporting each other. It goes into supporting other cinematographers as well. When I first moved out to Los Angeles from Chicago, I had shot a fairly low budget independent movie. And they were going to have a screening of it in one of the theatres in LA, and I thought, okay, this is my opportunity to invite all of my ASC heroes. So I sent off invitations to Conrad Hall and Haskell Wexler and Owen Roizman and all these people. And you know, Vilmos Zsigmond actually showed up. Vilmos showed up. And I told him, I said, well, Vilmos, I can’t even tell you what it means to me that you would show up to see my movie. Because it was a little movie with no stars in it, and stuff like that. And he said, well, you invited me, so I came. And he and I sat in the theatre during the screening of the movie. There was only like 5 or 6 people in the whole theatre. And he asked me, how did you that? Why didn’t you decide to light that way? And it was just really special. And the ASC members, certainly individually, but as a collective whole, we do this kind of outreach all the time.
SF: Okay, I’m sure you get this question. Where do you see the industry going?
You mentioned digital cameras. Are there any industry trends that you’d like to talk about? Or things that are happening. Internet. Something in the future. Where do you see this stuff going?
Michael Goi, ASC: Well, you know, one of the things that students always ask is, is this digital revolution a huge, big change to cinematography and the industry at large. And, you know, I gotta tell you it’s really not. Throughout the entire history the motion picture industry, there had been huge technological changes. In the 1920’s and 1927 you had the introduction of sync-sound in motion pictures. And also you had the introduction of two-strip, and then, finally three-strip color. In the 1950s we all of a sudden got widescreen processes with CinemaScope, Panavision and then large format 70mm. And then there was the introduction to television. And so, the entire history of the motion picture industry has been a history of evolution and change. And this is another one. It’s digital cameras, digital post production workflows. It’s just another one.
What it doesn’t do, it doesn’t necessarily by itself make better movies. It enables you to have possibly better tools to accomplish what you’re artistic vision is. But these things are just tools. They still need experienced and artistic practitioners to use them correctly. That’s why, when I talk to places, and like in Florida, I was speaking there, and the student said, ‘don’t you think your job as a cinematographer is obsolete?’ I said, ‘what do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘well, anybody who picks up a digital camera is instantly a cinematographer today.’ I said, ‘so if I just put an electric guitar in your hands right now, would you instantly become Eric Clapton?’ You know, it’s ludicrous to think that the tools make you a better filmmaker by holding them. You know, they’re just tools. You still have to have the vision.
SF: What kinds of stories would you like to make, or see made? What kinds of stories does the world need?
Michael Goi, ASC: Well, I’m not sure what the world needs. I have very wide ranging and eclectic tastes in movies. I was just actually thinking about what my top 10 favorite movies would be because somebody over here is compiling the list. It varies quite a bit. My favorite movie is The Graduate. It seemed to come along at just the right time where I was starting to recognize what cinematography actually was.
But in terms of movies that I shoot, I like to shoot a lot of different movies. I like to roll camera on actors who really know their craft well. It’s really a joy to be rolling the camera and knowing that you’re capturing a great performance. Action movies are fun, it’s always fun to go out and blow up stuff.
It’s not like I think a cinematographer can only do one type of movie or really settles into one type of movie. The thing that gets me excited anyway is to do a lot of diverse kinds of projects. As long as the filmmakers, as long as the directors are really enthusiastic about the movie they want to make that it’s fun for me. Because nothing deflates my interest faster than realizing that I care more about the quality of the movie that I’m working on than the director does.
SF: In the technology arena, we got a Red thing out there. What do you think about the Red One camera?
Michael Goi, ASC: Well, I think all of these cameras, the Red, the Sony F35, the Panasonic 3700, there’s a whole bunch of cameras we use, the Sony EX3. They all have their particular strengths. The trick is, and this is the big trick, is to not read marketing pamphlets and believing them as hard core technical data. That is a problem. And it’s not just a problem of students or young filmmakers starting out. Large, big producers do this, too, where you read something from the marketing department and you desperately want to believe what it says. You know, it says, ‘oh, you need half the crew, you can chop down your budgets, you need no lights,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they read all this stuff, and they so desperately want to believe it that on occasion they will buy the camera, or they’ll say to the cinematographer, ‘this is the camera you’re using because we don’t need any lights and you don’t need to do it.’ Well, excuse me, but we as the cinematographers, we’re the ones who get all this equipment first, we’re the ones who test it, and we’re the ones who find out what the truth is behind it, what you can actually do with it. So it’s important I think to whatever level you’re at to consult your cinematographer and to see based on the script – it always comes down to the script – based on the script, what is going to be the best camera package to use for that particular movie. A lot of producers though, are very smart and recognize this.
I did a movie for Al Ruddy. Al Ruddy won a couple of Oscars. He won an Oscar for The Godfather as producer, and he won an Oscar for Million Dollar Baby. And I was shooting a movie for Al. Actually I went in to interview for Al, and he had seen 16 cinematographers before me. And I walked into his office and he said to me, ‘Michael, we’re going to shoot this movie on high def, what do you think about that?’ And I had read the script, it took place on the beach in Malibu on water, on sand, and with a lot of African American actors in it. And I said to him, ‘Al, I think that’s actually a serious mistake.’ He said, ‘why is that?’ I said, ‘because I’m gonna have to bring in large 18Ks to balance out the light on your black actors’ faces. We’re gonna have to have extra grips to fly large diffusion frames over the sand so that it doesn’t burn out and become a white out and it’s gonna take time. It’s just the wrong choice for the movie you’re making.’ And he said, ‘well, we’ve already decided it’s gonna to be high def.’ And, you know, as it turns out he hired me anyway. And we were going through prep, and 3 days before we shot, he called me into his office again. He said, ‘do you still think it’s a mistake to shoot this movie in high def.’ I said, ‘yes, Al, I seriously do. It’s not that high def is bad or wrong, it’s just the wrong choice for this movie that you’re making.’ He said, ‘fine, shoot it on film.’ So we ended up shooting it on 35mm film. But the thing he told me was that out of all the cinematographers he interviewed for this, every single one of them said, oh yeah, no problem, easy, this is a piece of cake – you’re the only one who said I was making a mistake. I figured if you were willing to tell me that before you even have the job than you were really gonna watch my back when we got into production, to make sure I didn’t screw myself. It’s important that the people who hire cinematographers have an open mind to the contributions and to the suggestions that the cinematographer brings because when you get a good cinematographer we’re always looking, A, to increase the efficiency and artistry of the production and, B, to have that filmmaking experience be as pleasurable for everyone involved.
SF: Could you tell us a little bit about your film, Megan is Missing.
Michael Goi, ASC: Megan is Missing is a movie I wrote and directed, co-produced, and edited.
SF: What did you edit it on?
Michael Goi, ASC: Final Cut Pro in my garage. It’s a movie about internet predators and abducted and murdered children. It’s based on 2 years of research into 7 actual cases with a forensics investigator that I was working on a documentary with, and it’s a subject that I really wanted to make a movie on. And it seemed to coincide with my partners, Mark Gragnani and Melanie Harrison, bugging me for a year and a half to direct a movie. Because Mark and I were partners in Chicago with a company, and he and Melanie moved out to Los Angeles about 4 years ago and wanted to do a feature out here, to get themselves established. They kept bugging me about directing something, and I decided I wanted to do a movie about the subject. So they financed it. I wrote the script in 10 days because I’m a fast writer. We shot the movie in 8 1/2 days with a cast of 13 to 17 year old girls. Very small crew. Five people on the crew. No lights. No grip equipment.
SF: And you directed and DP’d that?
Michael Goi, ASC: No, I brought on 2 of my camera operators to be the directors of photography on that movie.
SF: What cameras did you use and what kinds of things did you use and do to capture the realism?
Michael Goi, ASC: We used Canon HDV cameras for the majority of that shoot. And we used Sony F900’s for news broadcast material that was in the movie. We just simulated like it was done with web cam and cell phone. The idea was always that this was gonna go to 35mm eventually. We have a 35mm negative and 35mm prints and stuff like that.
SF: What kinds of techniques did you use to simulate scenes done with web cams and cell phones?
Michael Goi, ASC: Well, basically we just followed the logical placement and the logical handling of those particular types of devices. And once I decided that, that was the part of the aesthetic of the movie, I decided I would never step out of it. So, like when the character’s talking on web chat on computer, I don’t shoot an angle that shows her in front of her computer because you wouldn’t be able to see that view. It would take you out of that sort of personal perspective of the movie.
SF: Was this your first time directing a feature film?
Michael Goi, ASC: Yeah. I had stepped in to finish directing something else that a director had left, but this was the first feature film.
SF: How did you feel stepping into the director’s role? Was it a comfortable thing for you? Also, how was it working with the actors? Were these experienced actors? How was it working with younger actors?
Michael Goi, ASC: Well, directing was very easy for me. I directed over 300 commercials in Chicago. Working with the actors really was easy for me. They were all girls who wanted to be actors but had never been in a movie before. And that was part of it. I didn’t want known faces in the movie. So that it would seem like, we just started shooting girls who lived next door to you or something like that. But they worked very, very hard. We shot 32 pages one day in 10 1/2 hours, and that was our longest day actually. Most the rest of the days were under 8 hours. I was only able to do that because they studied very hard and we rehearsed.
SF: What is your upcoming project? What’s your next thing that you’re working on?
Michael Goi, ASC: Next, I’m not sure, there’s a couple things floating. I just finished a series of webisodes which is interesting. This whole webisode phenomenon has really kind of taken off. I did 4 episodes lately. And this last one was for Breyers icecream with actress Jane Krakowski from 30 Rock. Those webisodes are actually on the internet now. But they put 30 second spots for them on TV and in the movie theatres, there’s iPhone downloads for them, and ultimately, they’re gonna to collect them on blu-ray DVD. The company licensed the use of Gone with the Wind and King Kong. And we shot Jane Krakowski on sets in New York City and inserted her into these movies. So it was a really fun project because I got to do 1930s lighting and give Jane a kind of glamour look. You can go to the website, it’s smoothanddreamy.com, and they have the King Kong and Gone with the Wind webisodes in there. But they’re talking about doing some of those on an international level now so they might be doing a lot more of those. But I’ve been helping out Geary McLeod on The Mentalist last season, and they’re about to gear up again. So until I latch on to another show or the deal for this next feature, I might work on The Mentalist some more.
Goi earned his first narrative film credit for Moonstalker in 1987. He received ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards nominations for the telefilms The Fixer (1999) and Judas (2005). Last year, Goi also garnered an Emmy® nomination for an episode of My Name is Earl.
His other credits include Witless Protection, Fingerprints, Red Water, What Matters Most, Who Killed Atlanta’s Children?, Christmas Rush, Funky Monkey, Welcome to Death Row, The Dukes, the Emmy® Award-winning documentary Fired-Up: The Story of Public Housing in Chicago, and the TV series The Wedding Bells and My Name is Earl. He also recently wrote, produced, and directed the narrative film Megan is Missing. Goi is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the Academy of Television Arts And Sciences.
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