Mr. Beaks Chats With NIGHTWING Cinematographer Charles Rosher, Jr.!

And here is Part Three of my NIGHTWING 30th Anniversary Coverage. Part One, with Nick Mancuso, is available here. And Part Two, with Stephen Macht, is right here. Today, we've got the NIGHTWING's director of photography, Charles Rosher, Jr. The son of the legendary cinematographer Charles Rosher (who won two Academy Awards, one of which was for F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE), Rosher, Jr. kicked off his career in 1970 with two very '70s dramas: James Bridges's THE BABY MAKER and ADAM AT SIX A.M (an early Michael Douglas vehicle). In 1971, he teamed with Roger Vadim on PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW, a notorious black comedy starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson as high school teachers who seduce their students (it's about more than that, actually, but the less you know about the film, the better it works). Though he worked steadily throughout the decade, Rosher really caught fire with his two Robert Altman collaborations, 3 WOMEN and A WEDDING. According to Rosher, it was his work on 3 WOMEN that caught the eye of director Arthur Hiller, who was then prepping a film called NIGHTWING sans his usual cinematographer, David M. Walsh. What Hiller saw in Altman's dreamlike drama that screamed "killer vampire bats", I have no idea, but he definitely hired the right guy. From the visually arresting magic-hour shots of the Painted Desert landscapes to the damp and shadowy cave lair of the vampire bats, Rosher gives NIGHTWING an A-picture sheen. Without his superlative work, I can guarantee you that we wouldn't be packing 'em in tonight at the Nuart for the film's 30th Anniversary screening (tickets available here). Being a fan of Rosher's work with Altman, Vadim, Hiller, Michael Ritchie (on SEMI-TOUGH!), Harold Becker and Allan Arkush (on HEARTBEEPS, a film with which I'm unhealthily obsessed), I was thrilled to spend a half-hour or so chatting with him on the phone. I caught Rosher on a Wednesday afternoon after he'd finished teaching at USC for the day, and tried to keep our conversation focused on NIGHTWING. I succeeded for a whole fifteen minutes! Hope you enjoy!

Mr. Beaks: The movie starts off with a series of shots of the New Mexico landscape. It's very nicely done, very evocative. And it prepares us for something that's definitely not a run-of-the-mill horror film. Whose idea was it to begin the film like that?

Charles Rosher, Jr.: I believe that was written in the script. And several people grabbed those shots: second unit would get some, you'd get some, and someone else would get some. That's the way that's usually done. You don't stop production to start shooting those things. You get it at the end of the day when you have time for a small crew to go shoot the shots - and it doesn't cost the company money for the first unit to do it - or somebody goes out to shoot the shots for us. Now if I'm doing a movie with Bob Altman, it wouldn't be that way: we'd shoot everything with him. But I do remember doing some of those shots [on NIGHTWING]. It was colorful territory.

Beaks: You had just come off of Altman's A WEDDING, which must've been completely different from doing a classical studio picture like NIGHTWING. Was the preparation different?

Rosher: There were a lot of people in A WEDDING. It was as large a film to do as the other one. I'd say they're equal in terms of preparing. A WEDDING was all in a day and it turned to dusk; we shot it all in one Armour Mansion. Whereas in a film like NIGHTWING, we're all over the place: we're in the studio shooting, there's a campfire attack, and we had to wait for things like the mechanics of Carlo Rambaldi's bats. And his bats! I though his bats in the campfire scene were so real. They really were good. And a lot of that was done without bluescreen; we shot it on wires, and then took the wires out during postproduction. We lit around it hoping not to light any of the wires so they wouldn't have to take them out. We did the best we could to do it that way, and what little we did [light], they took out. But I thought the bats looked really real in that scene. When you looked at them or held them in your hand, the battery would start going and the little mouth start biting. It was wild! You'd say, "This thing's real!" (Laughs) I think that sequence was the most believable bat attack. It was close angles, and the bats were on the actors' necks chomping away. (Laughs) They looked quite real if I remember correctly.

Beaks: I think that's the most effective scene in the movie.

Rosher: Yeah! All those innocent churchgoers. They were very nice people, and they were attacked and violated by these things.

Beaks: And one woman gets her head rolled over the truck tire.

Rosher: Oh, yeah. The truck goes over her head. I remember now.

Beaks: That does seem like the most carefully orchestrated of the set pieces. Do you remember that taking longer to shoot?

Rosher: Oh, yeah. We shot that on the stage. We made the campfire on the stage, and some of the bats' batteries would run down or get stuck. But these weren't serious disasters; they were just expensive mistakes. Whatever happened, we ultimately got everything. I forget how many days it took us to shoot that scene - probably three or four, maybe more. It probably took an additional day more than it should've because of mechanical problems.

Beaks: I was reading the original press notes, and apparently the cave set was especially large. Was that difficult to light?

Rosher: It was in a way, but in another it wasn't. A lot of our lights got damaged. It was supposedly the biggest cave set ever built, and it was on the biggest stage at Warner Bros. Stage 16, I think it was. It was a pretty high set, maybe fifty or sixty feet high. We had hung HMI lights... the biggest ones they had at that time were 6Ks. We hung a cluster of about eight of them together, and put them all in a circle - I'm thinking maybe there was only four or five now. But we would shoot that white light, that daylight, right down into the cave, and it would only hit that immediate area like a shaft of light. We had those lights hanging there for maybe two or three weeks of shooting, and, after we finished, all of the elements in the lights were broken. Nobody knew this at the time, but if those lights are tipped upside down for a long time, they completely self-destruct. So the studio had to pay for the damaging of these lights, which was probably $3,000 or $4,000 a light. It was about a $25,000 disaster for unknown things that we didn't know about. But it was the only way to light it! And then we'd use our units inside and put light across the walls of the caves to put shadows in there. We put regular incandescent units on the floor and rigged them around. It was a big lighting job to get the first big opening shot when [David Warner] drops into the cave on the rope. I remember the studio wondering how it was going to look because it was costing so much money, but it came out beautiful, I thought.

Beaks: It's a great shot. And it's rather surprising when you're watching it. He's setting up the screen, and then he stumbles, and then, boom, you're in the cave.

Rosher: And it's really that big. As big as you see it on the screen, it was that big in real life. Like I said, I think it's the biggest cave that's ever been photographed - and on the tallest soundstage around.

Beaks: So you could really feel the weight of the studio's expectations on this film.

Rosher: Sure. All the time. It was that kind of a film. Anytime you're doing strange things like we were doing, people are nervous that it's going to go overbudget or overschedule. I think the film did go overbudget and overschedule, but I don't know by how much. Not that much. But it went pretty well. We had a nice time doing the film. The actors were really pleasant. They were a nice bunch of guys, and David Warner's a wonderful character. Nick Mancuso's a great guy. Kathryn Harrold was terrific. Stephen Macht was a really nice guy, too, but I didn't see him that much.

Beaks: How was Hiller on the picture? This was something different for him.

Rosher: He was charming. He just loves being in the film business. He's a great combination of seriousness and fun. He's a really balanced man and very organized. A pleasure to work with. But it was a different piece of action for him to do. He told me he hired me because he liked what I did on 3 WOMEN with Altman. That's how I got into it. I also think his favorite cameraman couldn't work with him, too. It was somebody he worked with all the time [David M. Walsh]; I was recommended by that cameraman to work with him. But he really liked 3 WOMEN. I'll tell you one interesting thing we did on NIGHTWING. It was the scene where the bats attack the guy in the truck and he dies. They had it down for night, and they thought we were going to light this thing like the prairie and the little rolling hills. I said, "There's no way you can light this for night. It's not going to look good." I suggested we do it day-for-night, and everybody got concerned. That's because sometimes it looks good and sometimes it doesn't; you've got to have ideal conditions. So I conferred with some of my mentors - Conrad Hall, in particular. I asked him, "If I wait for this thing to backlight, I should be okay, right?" If I underexpose a couple of three stops, it's going to look like moonlight. So that's what I did. I put a lot of light on the person who was being attacked - more light than normal. And then when you print it down, the background goes down. It worked quite well. We shot day-for-night out there the whole scene. That was an interesting experience for me. It was my first day-for-night sequence in color.

Beaks: Do you remember there being a premiere for NIGHTWING?

Rosher: No. I have no idea what happened after it was over. I just read some of the reviews. The reviews weren't so bad on it, I think.

Beaks: I've read a few reviews from right around opening. Vincent Canby's write-up was not complimentary. But he was also Vincent Canby.

Rosher: There can be a snobbery about things - especially with a movie about bats. Everybody's got to make fun of it. It's just the thing to do. But we had a fun time on this movie.

Beaks: Aside from the tonal shifts, you can't see any signs of tension on screen.

Rosher: Oh, I've done films with tension. It's always a money issue. When you have private money shooting a film, even though it might go on to do very well, people are freaked out. Somebody gives $500,000, somebody gives $1.5 million... that's when you really get the tension. But it's worth doing. With private money, you can do really well on a film. There's no studio overhead.

Beaks: You also shot HEARTBEEPS, which is another strange film.

Rosher: Yes, it was! It was meant to be like an ALICE IN WONDERLAND film. We were all so disappointed that it didn't go well. When I read the script, I thought this was going to be a terrific little - well, somewhat big - film. We were in Santa Cruz locations, in the forest... it was very visual. We did a lot of visual things. The robots were beautiful to look at; Bernadette Peters and Andy Kaufman were terrific, I thought. But the studio thought the film didn't move fast enough, so they started cutting it down to an hour-and-a-half movie. And that's not right: it should've been an hour-and-forty-five-minute movie. The film would never go fast. Robots don't walk fast. All the action in the film was with these slow-walking robots. But the studio tried to grease it up and make it go faster in editing, and they actually hurt the film. That's one of those kinds of movies where you don't know what's going to happen.

Beaks: Do you think that longer cut still exists?

Rosher: I don't know. Michael Phillips would know. He's marvelous. He produced some big, big movies. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS...

Beaks: TAXI DRIVER.

Rosher: And he got an Academy Award for THE STING. He's a good guy. He's still running around trying to do things like everybody else. (Laughs)

Beaks: You can't slow down.

Rosher: Well, you slow down. But you never stop. (Laughs)

We actually talked a little while longer about his collaborations with Altman, Vadim and Becker (Rosher's especially proud of his work on THE ONION FIELD), but I'm going to save that for another time. AICN is starting up a screening series with the New Beverly, and I'm thinking it might be fun to do a 3 WOMEN/A WEDDING double feature with Rosher in attendance. A screening of PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW would also be quite welcome. I'll keep you posted on that. In the meantime, I'll hopefully see you tonight at the Nuart for NIGHTWING's 30th Anniversary celebration. Faithfully submitted, Mr. Beaks