Warren insists on shooting the movie's first interior-to-exterior location scene in continuity, even though the light will certainly fade before the company can possibly make the move outdoors. Advice from cardinals, bishops and first A.D. Frank Capra III can't sway him. Vittorio says, "No problem."
"We went outside," reports Tandrow, "and he put up huge whites everywhere—silks and muslins—and bounced blue-corrected Jumbos and made it look like daytime—and it was pitch black!" This happened the evening that I arrived, and the speed and exuberance of it made me laugh.
My son Jonathan and I had a great time operating the picture, frequently with two Steadicams side by side (often at focal lengths that would frighten an astronomer!). Vittorio has perhaps the best compositional sense of anyone I know, and he manages to pass it along democratically. The three of us would sometimes be head to head, weighing up the framing elements on our respective monitors. Jonathan reports that when a giant abstract painting on set stubbornly reflected some lights, instead of losing the glass or changing its angle, Vittorio took black tape and added another big abstract shape that covered the reflection and maybe even improved the composition.
Storaro was always right in the thick of things, hands-on, cutting a path through the crowd or happily squashed into the back of the limo between Jonathan and Warren, improvising on his dimmer board with one hand and pulling focus with the other as our midnight convoy of vans and trucks swept up Olympic Boulevard towing the shining black car on its long trailer, festooned with Mini-Jumbos, glowing with Vittorio's long-ago-imagined coruscations of color.
The only time that we ever saw his spirit dimmed was toward the end of a run of very long days. "The thing that is crazy is to work more than the normal hours, because there is a moment when you start feeling that you don't love any longer what you're doing. I don't think I'll do another movie in Hollywood without being very specific—after the normal hour, I have to go home. Because my brain doesn't work any longer. Because my eyes are burning."
Writing with Light
Storaro has often said, "Cinema is 'writing with light' [photo-graphy], in movement." He should probably add something about Color, since he recently stated that he is no longer interested in black-and-white cinematography. He jokes, "It would be like having a piano with only three keys."
Incidentally, he is amazed and disturbed by the number of trucks required for American filmmaking, and he fears that our artistic reflexes are deadened when things are so bloated. It interests me that he will go out and do those $2 million pictures with Carlos Saura (such as Taxi and the still-unreleased Tango), simply because he loves to light. In addition to his best-known films, I admire his mini-series Peter the Great, and Saura's recent quasi-documentary Flamenco. In every project he shoots there are stunning images, and they stick with you for a long time.
Vittorio's work on Bulworth is amazing. I remember the rich chiaroscuro in the Senator's office, and the L.A. City Hall (doubling for the Senate Office Building), with wonderful nighttime and daytime looks, and a great dimmer effect for summer lightning, flickering down corridors from all directions. I remember the light that fell everywhere on Halle Berry, as if Vittorio had suspended the laws of physics and poured it over her like champagne.
And about those Colors—both subtle and in-your-face: maybe they really do mess with the mind. After all, there were fewer suicides once they painted the George Washington Bridge blue, and pink rooms are said to have a calming effect on violent mental patients, and Philly cop cars are less provoking in white than red
The united colors of Bulworth mark Vittorio Storaro's personal journey, as well as Jay Bulworth's last campaign: I remember RED in the church, and ORANGE in the mansion, the YELLOW of the ballroom and the odd GREEN cyclorama at the TV station. I remember the eerily VIOLET streets of South Central. And Fabio's great "Circolare" high on a crane with its rings of aircraft landing-lights focused together into an intense WHITE spotlight from above, scything across the last scene.
Garrett Brown and Cinema Products Corporation shared an Oscar in 1978 for the invention and development of the Steadicam. Brown continues to operate on films and teach Steadicam workshops. He is also the inventor of the Skycam, and of the "Go", "Moby", and "Dive" cams that debuted at the Atlanta Olympics.
