Cinematography Style: Conrad Hall

INTRODUCTION

If you were to Google ‘who are the best cinematographers of all time?’, it won’t take long to stumble upon the name Conrad Hall. Through ten Academy Award nominations and three wins, the strength of his career speaks for itself.

His photography is characterised by neutral colour palettes, inventive uses of hard light, reflections and character focused framing which all culminated into a style which he called ‘magic naturalism’. In this episode I’ll look at what Conrad Hall had to say about his philosophy on photography and show some of the gear which he used in order to cultivate his photographic vision.

BACKGROUND

Hall was born in 1926 in French Polynesia and in his mid teens began attending boarding school in California. After graduating he signed up for a degree in journalism at USC, however that didn’t last long.

“Boy am I lucky that I got a D+ in journalism and had to change my major.”

He switched to the cinema program and began learning the basics of filmmaking, a relatively new art form to study at the time. 

To work in Hollywood on a camera crew back then required being a member of the International Photographers Guild. This left him without a job. To work around this Hall and some of his classmates created their own independent production company and produced a film called Running Target which Hall shot. This gained him membership to the guild however due to regulations he wasn’t allowed to be credited as cinematographer on the film, but rather as a visual consultant, even though he shot the entire film.

As a member of the guild he then worked his way up the ranks, from camera assistant, to camera operator until he eventually got a chance to photograph the feature film Morituri as the director of photography.  

Hall’s career went on to span many decades, from the 1950s to the early 2000s, during which time he worked with a host of esteemed directors which included: Richard Brooks, Stuart Rosenberg, John Huston, Steven Zaillian and Sam Mendes. 

PHILOSOPHY

When Hall was asked how he decided where to point the camera, he is reported to have said, “I point it at the story.”

To him, the story was always the starting point for determining his photographic decisions and the ultimate target he aimed for. Although the look of his photography changed between projects depending on the story and director he was working with, he carried over some philosophical concepts throughout his career. 

“I’ve never been somebody to get a movie to look absolutely perfect… Mine are always sort of flawed somehow or other. And in a way I don’t mind that because it’s not about perfection it’s about the overall feeling of the thing.”

His light wasn’t always perfectly soft, perfectly shaped and didn’t always have a perfect contrast ratio between light and shadow, his framing wasn't always perfectly symmetrical. By not always aiming for a perfectly beautiful image, much of his work carries a feeling of naturalism. He often incorporated interesting flourishes as well, such as using reflections, interesting hard shadows and atmospheric texture such as smoke or rain.

He called this magic naturalism: shooting things as they are, while at the same time incorporating stylistic touches that heightened the atmosphere of the story.      

“I’m one of those guys who doesn’t do a lot of augmenting. But who knows how to take the accident and turn it into something wonderful, magical. I look for that. I thrive on it. I feed on it. I don’t invent stuff. It invents itself and then I notice it and use it dramatically.”

Hall was a master of observing unintentional magical moments then using the photographic tools he had to emphasise them. Whether that was zooming into the reflection of a chain gang trapped in the sunglasses of a prison guard. Throwing hard light against a tree to create ominously moving shadows made by the wind. Or positioning a character who was a murderer so that the acciedntal reflection made by the rain on the window made it look like he was crying. 

When combined with an otherwise largely naturalistic look, these stylised little moments of ‘happy accidents’ elevated the story in a magical way.

Due to the length of his career, he started photographing films in black and white but of course moved on to using colour in his work as it replaced black and white as the dominant medium. A thread that he has carried through most of his colour films is using an earthy, neutral colour palette. Many of his films used lots of browns, greens, whites and greys, with strong, pure black shadows. The colour was rarely strongly saturated or vivid across the frame.

This meant that when a strong colour was used, like the famous use of red in American Beauty for example, it really stood out against the rest of the film’s neutral tones. 

GEAR

“It’s as complex a language as music. A Piano’s got 88 keys and you can use them in any complex way you want to. We got the sun and light. Is there anything more complex than light?”

As we mentioned, being open to ‘happy accidents’ is an important part of his cinematic philosophy, especially when it comes to light. For that reason he liked coming up with the majority of his lighting on the day, although sometimes for large spaces some basic pre lighting work was necessary. 

“I don’t like to figure things out ahead of time before the actors do”

For example, on Road To Perdition, many of the large interiors were sets constructed in a studio. During prep he got a rigging crew of 10 people to rig a collection of greenbeds and scaffolding overhead in the studio over 8 weeks. To this scaffolding his team rigged 30 10K fresnels and 60 5Ks which were all rigged to dimmers and used to light the backgrounds outside the windows. Basically acting the same as ambient sunlight outside. 

It also meant that all his lights were out of the sets and wouldn’t get in the way of the actor’s blocking or framing. The sets were also electrified so that practical light sources, such as lamps, could be plugged in and used. Much of his lighting was done with tungsten balanced lights.

With these fixtures rigged in place he could then come in on the day and position the lights as he desired. A lot of the light was hard and undiffused, something he often did in many of his films. This resulted in strong lines of shadow.

He regularly created shape by breaking up the light with interesting textures or used parts of the set to shape the shadows which were cast.

When lighting interiors he would also use what he called ‘room tone’, where he bounced smaller fixtures like a 1K into the ceiling to provide a soft ambient base light to a room. This filled in the contrast from the hard light a bit. Because the light is soft and bounced it’s not very directional which means it’s difficult to tell where exactly it comes from. In this way it provides an overall lift to the space in a natural way. Once this base ‘room tone’ was in place he could then work on lighting the characters. Often hitting them from the side or behind with a hard source.

He used this same hard backlight to bring out textural components like smoke or rain.

When it came to selecting lenses he liked using a wide collection of prime focal lengths from 27mm to 150mm. Unlike the recent trend of using wide angle lenses for close ups, Hall took more of a traditional approach. We used wide angle lenses for wide shots and longer focal lengths for close ups that threw the background out of focus.

However he did sometimes use long lenses, like Panavision’s 50-500mm zoom, creatively for wide shots to increase the feeling of heat waves with distortion and represent characters as more wispy yet menacing.

He liked using a shallow depth of field, usually setting the aperture of his lenses between T/1.9 and T/2.5. This gave the photography an emotional dimension and clearly showed the focus (literally) of the shot.

Hall mainly used Panavision cameras and lenses. He shot on 35mm film before the advent of digital cinematography with cameras such as the Panavision Platinum. He especially liked using Panavision Primo lenses for their look, reliability and wide range of focal lengths.

To achieve the colour he liked he used fine grain tungsten Kodak film stocks for interiors as well as exterior daylight scenes. For example, he used the more modern Kodak Vision 200T for his later work, and Eastman EXR 100T for his older work. A lot of the classic 60s and 70s-feeling muted, neutral colour came from his use of Eastman’s famous 100T 5254 colour negative film.

For some films, such as Butch Cassidy, he wanted the colour to be even more muted and to pull out the cliche blue often used in ‘western skies’. To do this he radically overexposed the film, then got the film laboratory to compensate for the overexposure in the print. This further washed out the colour and turned the blue a softer, lighter shade.  

CONCLUSION

“Those are the kind of films that I like to get a hold of and don’t often get a chance to do. Stuff that, like, goes on forever about some basic and important human condition that is bigger than all of us and will go on forever no matter what era it’s set in.”

Conrad Hall’s selection of films that he photographed is a reflection of his style as a whole. Telling simple, natural stories that represent something bigger through his injection of magical moments. 

One thing that he always tried to do was to tell stories so well that if the sound was turned off the audience would still understand the story just based on the images. His love for the medium, his powers of observation and ability to translate stories using whatever magic naturally occurs on set is what has made him one of the greatest of all time.