Director-Cameraman

Jimmy Ennett – Australian Naked Filmmaker

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Jimmy Ennett – Australian Naked Filmmaker

A few months ago I was reviewing my Youtube account and saw a mile of comments left on my videos. A few of them were from a young filmmaker in Australia named Jimmy Ennett who said that he was a one-man filmmaker, too, and that he’d even bought my book Naked Filmmaking. This was very personally uplifting for me to learn that not only was Naked Filmmaking reaching beyond U.S. borders, but that it was also spreading out into new hemispheres. I quickly sent this young compatriot a thank you e-mail and we began corresponding. I wanted to know...

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The Book That Changed My Life

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The Book That Changed My Life

I was born in 1955. I loved movies as a kid and by around 1967 or so I was already thinking about wanting to make my own. I’d even started writing my own scripts. But cinema studies and film production was still very new. In Los Angeles, one of the colleges, U.C.L.A., had started a film school, but even then it was pretty ramshackle. There were only a few published books on the subject back then. Most were on film theory, written my English professors turned film analysts. I didn’t understand what they were talking about then and I...

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John Cassavetes Making “Husbands” – A Rare Insight

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John Cassavetes Making “Husbands” – A Rare Insight

Years ago PBS’ American Masters broadcast a 90-minute profile on John Cassavetes. To be honest, I’d grown up reading about the importance of Cassavetes and how critics raved about his films. My first Cassavetes movie was Husbands, which CBS ran in their early days of late-night programming. I hated it. This was not filmmaking to me at that time. This was just turning on the camera and rolling. There was no story and no drama. It was just filling time. Keep in mind, I was still a teenager at the time. A few years later A Woman Under The...

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Steven Spielberg – Director-Cameraman

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Steven Spielberg – Director-Cameraman

In my on-going series showing clips of major directors who also operate their own camera, as opposed to the stereotype of standing behind a bank of monitors with a cup of Starbucks in their hand. This clip shows Steven Spielberg on the set of Jurassic Park directing actors, blocking the scene, and operating his own Panavision camera and skillfully working the geared head wheels, one of the hardest feats to master. Notice how quickly and efficiently he works. Early in his career he was known for doing ten to twenty takes on everything. Here you see him grabbing shots...

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Francis Coppola & George Lucas – The Lost Documentary

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Francis Coppola & George Lucas – The Lost Documentary

Before Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas became Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas they were two like-minded independent filmmakers who wanted to make personal films that they never expected anybody to want to see. Unfortunately for them, at that time, they turned out to be right. The little movie that Coppola took his band of brave new filmmakers on the road with was The Rain People, his effort at making a film in the United States by putting to practice how he had seen movies in Europe being made. He kept his crews small and even used French-made...

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Mike Figgis – Writer-Director-Cameraman

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Mike Figgis – Writer-Director-Cameraman

In my on-going series bringing attention to film directors who don’t simply sit comfortably behind monitors, nursing cups of Starbucks, but who jump into the filmmaking process with a camera on their shoulders, getting dirt under their fingernails like the rest of the crew, this week I want to pay homage to UK filmmaker Mike Figgis. Mike Figgis had been a musician and performance artist before ultimately becoming a writer-director of crime noir films Stormy Monday and Internal Affairs. At first he was welcomed to Hollywood and given carte blanche. After that, however, he started to suffer from more...

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Claude Lelouch – Un Homme et une Eclair CM3

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Claude Lelouch – Un Homme et une Eclair CM3

In the late 1960s, when I was an early teenager, ABC-TV ran A Man And A Woman on the Sunday Night Movie of the Week. Up to that time about the only foreign films I had seen were Italian Hercules movies, which weren’t good even then. But I was curious what all the buzz was in the air about foreign film. Once A Man And A Woman started I was glued to the screen. At that point in filmmaking hand-held camera was mostly used only fleetingly in fight scenes in movies and as a quick second-unit shot. But I...

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Stanley Kubrick – Naked Filmmaker

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Stanley Kubrick – Naked Filmmaker

I drive a 15-year-old Toyota. Drink five dollar a bottle wine. Wear T-shirts until you can see through them and patched jeans. But when it comes to cameras, I have to have the best I can afford. Ever since I was in my late teens and discovering photography I was always drawn to the best gear — at that time Nikon. Having been a TV news cameraman for the past 25 years I’ve been privileged (and spoiled) by having access to the best cameras, microphones and tripods available. So I have a delicate palate when it comes to gear....

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