A Conversation with Billy Williams, BSC

QUESTION: I understand your father was in the business?

WILLIAMS: He entered the industry and worked in a studio in North London and that's where he started his apprenticeship. Then in the First World War, he went in the Navy and filmed the surrender of the German fleet in 1919, which is historic archive material. He then became a documentary expedition type cameraman. In 1928 he filmed the General Motors Chevrolet expedition from Capetown to Cairo and then on to Stockholm as a freelancer. He had his own cameras and so he did documentary, expedition, newsreels and some features. When I left school I started with him as his apprentice and his assistant.

QUESTION: Is that what you always intended to do?

WILLIAMS: I was only 14 when I left school and I was too young to really know except that I'd been surrounded by cameras and lenses all my life because of my father. I was attracted to the job, but of course it was so insecure, and even more so in those days I think. My mother was keener on me getting a regular job. She had a brother-in-law who worked in London in the finance world. She wanted me to take a job there which would have been very secure but fortunately, I went with my father, and I don't regret anything.

QUESTION: Was that difficult to work under your father?

WILLIAMS: He was a very hard taskmaster. He expected a lot. Everything had to be just right, especially regarding the equipment because it was his own gear. You looked after the camera like a baby. It was worth it, though. I acquired a traditional philosophy: if the job is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

QUESTION: How long did you work with him?

WILLIAMS: Four years, and then I served, two years in the RAF as a photographer.

QUESTION: Where did that take you? What did you do?

WILLIAMS: I didn't go abroad. I was in England but I was taking still photography and doing all the printing in the darkroom and aerial survey work.

QUESTION: Were you doing still photography before that?

WILLIAMS: Yes and I believe that experience helped me. I love black and white film, and of course my early work was all in black and white. My very first feature film was in black and white. It's my great regret that I've never done a major movie in black and white, but when I'm framing and composing and lighting, I'm more aware of tones than colors.

QUESTION: When you got out of the Air Force, what did you do?

WILLIAMS: I got a job with a company making films about transportation, railways, ships, etc. I worked there about five years. I wanted to become a cinematographer, so I left and bought my own Arriflex camera.

QUESTION: What did you learn during those five years?

WILLIAMS: I think I learned to appreciate composition and the nature of light, because most of the work was exterior. If we did interiors, they were quite small scale, so you were always trying to get the best out of the available light and traveling to a variety of locations. You tend to build up an appreciation of architecture and nature and the behavior of light.

QUESTION: What was the purpose of those films?

WILLIAMS: Some of them were instructional films; some were films to encourage people to travel, and others were more historical films.

QUESTION: But you wanted to go on to do features?

WILLIAMS: I wanted to do features for years, but here I was in my early 20s in England. There were these two leagues-the feature league and the shorts and documentary league, which was very much a minor affair. It was almost impossible to cross over because the training was so different. I mean, I didn't have any training in working at a major studio with Mitchell cameras. I'd seen the camera, but I really didn't understand it. I was very frustrated that I couldn't get a job even as a focus puller on features. What happened was that television arrived and I started to work for a company that made commercials.

QUESTION: Was shooting commercials very experimental in those days?

WILLIAMS: Oh yes. I think over the years commercials have continued to be almost forerunners of the future of film. A lot of ideas have developed in commercials and then been incorporated into feature films. Not all of them good ideas, but there are trends in cinematography-the hard light phase, film noir, fog filters, soft lights-that began in commercials.

QUESTION: You worked for some pretty interesting directors in those days, didn't you?

WILLIAMS: At first, I worked in black and white. Color television came in 1964. What was good about commercials in those days was that people were coming from documentaries, television, and features. We were all coming together in commercials so we were introduced to a whole new range of personalities, and in my case I worked with Ken Russell, John Schlesinger and Ted Kotcheff. Within about three or four years of my working with them on commercials, I was doing features for them. It was Ken Russell that gave me my first big picture.

QUESTION: Tell us how your first big feature came about?

WILLIAMS: I'd done about three or four low budget pictures. Ken Russell got this picture called Billion Dollar Brain with Michael Caine and Karl Malden. Ken said he wanted me. I was 36. So that was my first big feature. We went off to Finland and shot in the snow.

QUESTION: The relationship between cinematographers and directors is really interesting, isn't it?

WILLIAMS: It's a key relationship. I compare it sometimes to a partnership-a marriage. You have your ups and downs and highs and lows, but you are using each other as a sounding board for ideas. You don't always agree but out of it comes something that is getting the best of what you both have to contribute.

QUESTION: Looking back, did your work come from an aesthetic sense?

WILLIAMS: Well, I think some of it has to be within. I think it must have been ingrained in me because I've always been surrounded by moving images, but maybe I was born with some tiny talent as well. The fact that I'd been immersed in this all my life I think was an advantage, but you've always got to be looking forward to do something else. I did Women in Love in 1968, and in those days, it wasn't thought to be very smart to mix the color of light.

QUESTION: Were you surprised when you were nominated for an Oscar® for that?

WILLIAMS: I really didn't know anything about the Oscars and unfortunately I couldn't come because I was shooting Zee and Co. with Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine.

QUESTION: What affect did an Oscar® nomination have on your career?

WILLIAMS: It probably opened some doors. I'd previously done some commercials with John Schlesinger and he was going to do a picture called Sunday Bloody Sunday.

QUESTION: That was a totally different type of picture.

WILLIAMS: Yes. He told me he wanted to do it quite differently. He said he wanted me to under-photograph it. I think the cinematographer has got to serve the story. He's got to tell a particular story according to the requirements of the script and the way the director sees the picture. I've never believed in going into one picture after another and imposing my style on it. I feel that each story has it's own requirements and I try to photograph each scene within a movie according to the mood that's being created by the actors and the written word.

QUESTION: How did you get to come to the U.S. to shoot On Golden Pond?

WILLIAMS: Well, it was a stroke of luck really. Mark Rydell had worked with Vilmos Zsigmond, and Vilmos and I have been friends for some time. Mark wanted Vilmos to do the picture, but he wasn't available. Vilmos suggested me and so I came over and spent a few days on location with Mark. We got along fine and it was a very good working relationship.

There are some films where everything comes together-starting with a good script, the right cast and team-and that was one of them. I think I've always felt that good filmmaking comes out of a partnership-creative people pulling in the same direction. I'd worked with Katherine Hepburn about six or seven years before on The Glass Menagerie. In On Golden Pond, she kept coming up to me with this scarlet cardigan. The palette we were using for the film was much more muted, natural colors. The interior of the house was very warm golden colors and the lake was blues and greens of course. She kept coming up with this scarlet cardigan! She would say, 'Billy, don't you like this? It's a wonderful color.' I would agree and tell her how bright it was. She said, 'Haven't you seen any of the French Impressionist paintings? They've always got a dash of red in them.' She knew what the camera would pick up because even if she was on the other side of the lake you'd have seen her in that red. There's a kind of realization that people like her who have spent their lives in front of the camera know what the camera sees and they depend on the cinematographer to understand how to compose a scene so that you get the best out of it. You're job is to capture what the scene is about.

In On Golden Pond, I didn't want to make the picture look too romantic because I thought there was enough sentiment in the story. I also didn't want to make the actors a great deal younger because the whole point was that they were an elderly couple. Mark was keen to get some kind of diffusion or softening of the image and I really wasn't too much in favor of that. We reached a kind of compromise, which was to use a low contrast filter to soften things a little bit. We used it for a couple days and when the dailies came back I realized we had a big problem, because when you were pointing towards the water, this low contrast filter was doubly effective. When you pointed into a dark area, it wasn't so effective. There were flares coming from the water. I told Mark and we agreed to take the filter out. People often say to me that it looks like I used some kind of softening device but I didn't. I used the 100 ASA stock of the day, and I used quite a bit of soft light, rather than hard light and that was it.

QUESTION: What are some of your other most memorable pictures?

WILLIAMS: I did a picture called Voyage of the Damned that had an incredible all-star cast including Orson Wells. He came in to Barcelona, Spain, and had three big scenes to do on different days. He came on the set the first day and was plastered with makeup. He looked like mahogany! I told the director he had too much makeup. He said, 'Well, there's nothing we can do about it. He's ready to go and I spoke to the makeup artist again and he said he did his own makeup.' So at the end of the day, I thought I've got to say something because we've got two more scenes to do and they are separated in the movie, and I'd rather that we get part of it right. So I went up and very politely asked him if he would wear less makeup and he gave a great big belly laugh and said, 'If I didn't wear all this makeup I'd look very pasty and white.' I left it at that and the next day he came on and the makeup was perfect. I think there are times when you've got to be prepared to kind of say what you think is right. You've got to work very closely with the actors. That relationship is crucial.

QUESTION: Gandhi was a totally different type of picture for you. How did you prepare for it?

WILLIAMS: I'd never been to India before, but the director and I looked at a lot of newsreel footage of Gandhi. There was a lot of black and white film of his early life, the marches and the fasting and all these scenes with thousands of people following him. I remember my parents talking about Gandhi back in the 1930s when I was a boy. He wasn't very well received in the British press at the time because he wanted India to be given back to the Indians.

When I got the script I thought it was really wonderful. I went to India six weeks ahead of everyone else and started looking around to get the feel of the place. I scouted locations and worked with the production designer and so on. I think the great success of the film was Ben Kingsley's performance. It's one of the great performances in cinema I think.

QUESTION: What are the films that really meant something to you beyond your Oscar® nominations?

WILLIAMS: I think Eagle's Wing was an important film. It was a Western but without the usual Western clichés. There was Kid Blue with Dennis Hopper. It was a black comedy with a very amusing script. It never got much promotion. Another film I'm very fond of is Dreamchild that is from a script by Dennis Potter, a famous English writer who wrote some very significant work for television. It's the story of the little girl that Lewis Carroll wrote about in Alice in Wonderland. We shot it in a studio and on location in Liverpool. We needed a lot of archive material because half the film takes place in the 1930s on an ocean liner coming to New York. The other half is in flashbacks to the 1860s.

QUESTION: When did you start teaching?

WILLIAMS: In 1978, I was invited to Beaconsfield, which is the National Film and Television School near London. I did a workshop with cinematography students. I've been going back there ever since to do lighting workshops. Then, for a number of years I went to Rockport, Maine, where they have the International Film Workshops, and also to Budapest and CamerImage in Poland.

QUESTION: Why you do that?

WILLIAMS: I feel I was lucky that my father was able to pass on his knowledge to me because there weren't film schools in those days. When you're with students they are very frank and open. They want to know the answers. So, I'm forced to reflect and analyze how I approach my work. It made me realize that we're in the communications business-we're communicating the written word for the screen and the cinematographer's role is to visualize with the director how you are going to capture the drama of the script and the essence of each particular scene.

QUESTION: Do you think the role of the cinematographer is changing?

WILLIAMS: The responsibility is very much the same in that it is your job to tell the director's story visually. The equipment has become more flexible and more lightweight, and the film stock has become so much faster that it's opened up more areas to work in. I think you've got to have ideas, a vision, and imagination and be able to interpret the story and each story is different. I think the cinematographer's role is a supportive role to the director but there are many times when one can nudge the director in a certain direction or put forward ideas that can open up new areas of expression. If you have a good understanding with the director you can bounce ideas off one another and develop things so that you are moving things forward in terms of the story telling and the visuals. If you don't have a good relationship with the director, of course, that's not so easy, but that's a matter of chance because personality comes into it so much and sometimes things work really well and other times not quite so well.

QUESTION: Is the role of the cinematographer going to change because of technology, or is it going to be the same using new technology?

WILLIAMS: I think the principal photography of the movie will continue very much as it has been done in the past. But I think today and tomorrow's cinematographers have got to be much more aware of what can be done in postproduction because 10 years ago you finished a movie in the lab and that was it. There was a limited amount of things that you could change. But as we all know now, there are an infinite number of things that can be changed, so when one goes into a picture today I think you need to have some knowledge in advance of what might be done in post and how much you need to involve people doing the digital effects. Now, I think it's essential that the cinematographer is involved in all of the digital postproduction because otherwise your work can be completely destroyed.

QUESTION: Are you optimistic about the future of movies.

WILLIAMS: I hope that we don't lose good story telling for the sake of flashy effects. I think audiences will get tired of movies if all they are is a big fireworks display. I think you've got to engage audiences with good scripts and characters they can relate to. Of course you can do things that have never been done before and that's exciting. But there's got to be a limit, I think.

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