Cinematographer Jack Green, ASC, known for his work with Clint Eastwood, talks with Ira Tiffen about his experience as a DP and how he creates the look.
In July of 2005, I had the privilege and distinct pleasure of talking with Jack Green, ASC about aspects of his experiences as Director of Photography. He had just come off production on Joss Whedon’s science fiction adventure, Serenity, following his work on Judd Apatow’s, The 40 Year Old Virgin.
Jack’s first cinematography credit was for Heartbreak Ridge in 1986. He went on to do many further films for director Clint Eastwood.
Jack was nominated for an Oscar for Unforgiven in 1993, and for the American Society of Cinematographers’ (ASC) Outstanding Achievement Award for The Bridges Of Madison County in 1996. In 1998, he received the President’s Award from the Society of Camera Operators.
In February, 2009, he received the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor bestowed on a very exclusive group of cinematographic visionaries.
Ira Tiffen: What I’m looking for, Jack, is to help people who are initially presented with a project to understand what kind of thought processes – investigative searches into technology, delving into art, looking into lighting, whatever there is – go into what it takes to define and achieve ‘the look.’
We would start from the beginning of a project; what goes on when you’re handed something and told, ‘Here, would you like to shoot this? We’re considering you for a job.’ What happens when you meet the director and you’re talking with the producer and everybody has their own ideas? How do they meld into something that has everybody rowing in the same direction? And then what does it take to actually make it happen? The main idea is to give people advice based on experience of how to approach this themselves.
Jack Green, ASC: Well, let me first start off with this little story, an anecdote about how when I was approaching the idea of becoming a cinematographer… Susan, my wife, knew that I was really, really nervous. Clint had asked me to move up on Honky Tonk Man and I asked him if I could respectfully decline; I didn’t think I was really quite ready… He accepted that and I kept operating for a couple more pictures for him, but I knew that he was going to ask again. So one day I was sitting around reading…in the afternoon and…I hear a ‘thump, thump,’ on the front door. We were living in Palos Verde at the time, and I go to the door and my wife can’t open the door because she’s got books in her arms up to her chin [chuckles] so I grabbed them from her as quickly as I could and she says, ‘I got more,’ so she went back to the car and I took those in and they were art books. Every art book that she could lay her hands on. I hadn’t thought of that as a way of learning about the potential of cinematography. I then placed those art books around… and these are classic art books, you know, Da Vinci and Michelangelo and all of the Impressionists, art and everything in these most beautiful books, beautiful pictures, and so I proceeded to just really immerse myself in these books. I had them stashed everywhere, in the little men’s room library (and) right next to the television…switcher so you had to pick that up before you turned on the television, and everything just to make sure that I didn’t leave anything out. I really found that there was a lot to learn from all of this art… I had loved art before, but I had never studied that kind of art from that perspective, of how it could educate me to apply it to my soon-to-be craft.
And how studying ‘Art’ helped him to visualize…
God, I learned so much, and it was from there that I learned more about what my job was, to try to emulate, than it was from seeing past films, although I did research lots of really wonderful films as well. Clint did ask me, in 1985, to move up to Director of Photography on Heartbreak Ridge…that was the beginning. Clint, as a director, says so little; I’ve come to find out working for a lot of other directors that most directors like to have a lot of input as to the style of the photography. I love to glean the information from the directors about their idea for ‘the look.’ Certainly they end up, most of them, doing a lot of their own research, and build little albums of still photographs of ‘the look’ for their picture. In Clint’s case, he says, ‘OK, we’ll start on the day we start,’ that’s about it. You don’t get a lot…(I got) about the most on the third picture I did with Clint…a picture called Bird…a picture about Charlie Parker…
Ira Tiffen: Forest Whitaker…
Jack Green, ASC: Yeah, starring Forest Whitaker, but (about the) 1930’s, ‘40’s and ‘50’s jazz era and…I knew Clint’s love for the picture, so I knew the look was really important. He called me into his office, before we were going to start to prep, and he says, ‘Jack, I have a really interesting idea for the look of this film.’ And I said, ‘You know what, we come from the same era…’ He’s only nine years older than I am; we grew up in the same area, the…San Francisco Bay area; he grew up more in Oakland, I grew up more in San Francisco. But we both loved jazz in our early years and I spent a lot of time in jazz bars and listening to jazz musicians. I studied trumpet because…I loved music and that’s what I thought I was going to do with the rest of my life; but as it turned out, I didn’t.
So I said, ‘Clint, let me, let me shoot a test for you, and if the test doesn’t resemble what I think you have on your mind, then we can use the test as something to adjust on.’ And he says, ‘Terrific!’ So I, Tom Stern the gaffer, who is now his cinematographer, and I got together a camera, a couple of lights, and Forest Whitaker, and we borrowed one of the sound recording rooms at Warner Brothers. (We) put Forest on this chair with a saxophone and hit him with one light, putting a very hard edge on him…and it became the poster for the one sheet and everything else. But…then I bounced just a little light into the saxophone, the available light that was lighting him. I put a white card, not so it would fill in, but just so it would put a little light into the dark side of the saxophone, very little. And we previewed it the next day in one of the screening rooms and he elbowed me after he saw the test and he says, ‘You got it.’
And that look was from having been in nightclubs…and reading the jazz magazines of that era: Downbeat, Jazz magazine, Be-Bop Magazine, all of these magazines of the time, presented these black-and-white photographs of these jazz musicians, and I saw those just like I’m sure Clint did and built his memory. I built my memory out of the same material, and so I knew what he wanted the minute he was calling me in for a meeting.
That’s one of those occasions where like minds really coincide so perfectly. We did Bird that way, and won the Palme d’Or, and (the Cannes Film Festival Technical Award)…so, that’s one way to achieve a ‘look’ and achieve the reason to have a ‘look.’
All of the while, as Clint’s cinematographer, I did either fourteen or fifteen pictures for him, and that was the only time out of all of them that he said he had an idea about a ‘look.’ All of the rest of them, he was like, ‘Howdy, let’s get to work…’ It took me a long while to adjust to other directors, who didn’t trust you to supply the ‘look,’ or hire you for the ‘look.’ They wanted to have input as to what that look was in their perception; part of what you get out of each director is sometimes educated, they’ve educated themselves as to what they want to see, how they want to see it. There are other directors that have in their imagination, which you have to extract through a series of really intense meetings where you make him say to you (what) his feelings (are) about the storytelling. If you can’t describe images, and he doesn’t have a portfolio of pictures… you actually have to just live with the man (to) understand the way he sees life, from his point of view, to how he sees life as it would be applied to the filmmaking process. You really have to do a pretty good thorough brain-picking (to get) to where you’re going to supply him with the image that he would feel most comfortable with.
In over 30 years of making optical filters, Ira Tiffen created the Pro-Mist, Soft/FX, Ultra Contrast, GlimmerGlass, and others, netting him both a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a PrimeTime Emmy Award. Elected a Fellow of the SMPTE in 2002, he is also an Associate member of the ASC, and the author of the filter section of the American Cinematographer Manual.
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