Lights, Cameras and Action

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“I can’t believe I get paid for this!” exclaims cinematographer Robby Baumgartner.

He’s talking about shooting his latest film, Fair Game, a political thriller starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts that’s scheduled for release in 2010. The film is based on the memoirs of former CIA operative Valerie Plame, who was infamously outed by the Bush administration in 2003.

If Baumgartner’s enthusiasm sounds unusual for a man who has been in the film business for 25 years, maybe that’s because he only recently took on the role of director of photography. He learned the bulk of his craft working as a gaffer—or head of lighting—on such films as There Will Be Blood, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and 21 Grams.

It’s through gaffing that Baumgartner acquired what he describes as a “library of knowledge of how to shoot a film.” And now that he’s the director of photography, Baumgartner says, “all that information is just pouring out.”

Still, there’s a lot to learn. “Time is the most crucial thing on a film,” Baumgartner says. “Every second has a dollar figure. How long does it take you to do something? Can you tell the story you need to tell in that time?”

This ticking clock “creates a lot of stress, but it also creates a lot of energy.”

 

 

Baumgartner’s ability to manage both the stress and the energy is being tested on Fair Game, whose director, Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), is known for his improvisational, self-described “rebel approach” to filmmaking.

On Fair Game, little pre-production time was spent figuring out lenses, lighting and camera angles. Instead, Liman and Baumgartner were “doing our camera test as we were shooting.”

To accommodate Liman’s desire for freedom of camera movement, Baumgartner created sets where the director can “come into every location and be able to see 360 degrees...The cables, the trucks, the lights—everything needs to be out of sight. We don’t know if the scene is going to be here or there, inside or outside.”

Baumgartner admits that this run-and-gun method is “not entirely comfortable for me. But every film has a different personality. It’s organic and exciting.”

However Fair Game turns out, Baumgartner will add the experience to his mental database. But don’t expect him to use that knowledge to put too much of himself into his projects.

“If you try, as a cinematographer, to impose your style on a film, you’ve made a mistake right out of the gate,” Baumgartner explains. “There isn’t a style. There is what’s right for the film.”