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Another distinctive aspect of the film is Daviau’s expert use of smoke effects, which in essence allowed him to “light air” using a practical-heavy approach in which sources were generally left in plain view. This technique was perhaps most expressively employed during the film’s extensive forest “exteriors,” some of which were shot on stages in Culver City that were originally built in 1917. (The sense of history was not lost on Daviau, who noted, “I enjoyed working on the lot where King Kong and Gone With the Wind were filmed. There is a presence to a studio where great films have been made, and production designer Jim Bissell made the most of it.”) To maintain a sense of mystery and wonder, Spielberg didn’t want audiences to see E.T.’s face until late in the first act. “That probably gave Allen his biggest challenge,” the director said later. “We’d see E.T. in silhouette, we’d see him in backlight, but we’d never get a good look at his face until later in the movie. It took many, many small lighting units, and because E.T. was very limited in terms of [range of] movement, it took a lot more time to light him than it did to light any of the humans. Allen spent hours giving E.T. more expressions than perhaps [mechanical creature-effects creator] Carlo Rambaldi and I ever envisioned, because he found by moving a light, by moving the source of the key from half-light to toplight, E.T.’s 40 possible expressions were suddenly 80. [It was all in] the way Allen shifted his light.” “In describing what he wants in a shot, Steven will sometimes say two things that may appear contradictory,” Daviau told AC. “That means he wants you to work toward incorporating both. For example, he’d say, “I don’t want to see E.T.’s face, but I want to see him just enough.’ Challenges like that make for distinctive photography. For a scene in the bedroom where Elliot entices E.T. out of the closet, I had to make E.T. as near a silhouette as possible and still show his eyes!” A runaway success that long dominated box-office charts, E.T. was a breakthrough for Daviau on all levels, instantly elevating him from relative obscurity and earning him Academy and BAFTA nominations. “I was an unknown person before E.T., so I know how fortunate I am as a result of that film,” he says. He revisited the picture for its 20th-anniversary theatrical re-release in 2002, and found the original negative and accompanying archival interpositive in pristine condition at Universal. “The experience was a testament to the archival quality of motion-picture film,” he notes. After collaborating with Spielberg again on the Twilight Zone: The Movie fantasy segment “Kick the Can” and George Miller’s rip-roaring horror entry “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” Daviau stepped into reality-based drama with the Cold War thriller The Falcon and the Snowman. After reteaming with Spielberg on an episode of the series Amazing Stories (“Ghost Train”) and shooting second unit on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the duo tackled a high-profile project that would endure heavy scrutiny throughout its production, The Color Purple (AC Feb. ’86). “When you make a movie from a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that has been widely read and greatly appreciated, everyone is just waiting to see what you will do with it,” Daviau told AC. “And it was an enormous story to tell. The photography had to serve the clarity of the storytelling first, and also delineate these characters you’re going to live with for over 30 years.” Alice Walker’s tale is told in the form of “letters to God” written by a naïve, long-suffering African-American woman (played by Whoopi Goldberg), and the film maintains this very human viewpoint throughout. On location in North Carolina, Daviau, production designer Michael Riva and Spielberg analyzed every angle of their practical locations, nearby roads and adjacent buildings; the same attention to detail went into the interiors built onstage back in Los Angeles, including a rural “juke joint.” Daviau recalls, “Half the juke joint was a screened-porch area. We had a lot of space, and there were slots in the roof to allow beams of light to come in. So we had the motivation of the setting sun pouring through one end of the place, while the other was dark as night and lit only by oil lanterns.” Because the lanterns had to serve as practicals, gaffer Norm Harris “gimmicked” the prop fixtures. His electrician built gadget lights — dimmer-controlled, high-intensity halogen globes — that would fit onto the back of them opposite the camera, allowing the lamps to burn with a visible real flame inside. In order to fully read the expressions of the all-black cast, the filmmakers decided that “set interiors and set decorations should all be darker than normal,” says Daviau. “It’s easier to deal with dark faces against a midtone or darker background than it is against a light background The lighting of the faces can be much more subtle and naturalistic. It’s the face that you’re trying to keep in the foreground, so you don’t want the [walls] competing with the face.” Daviau’s use of a mild Superfrost-type filter in the juke joint “added a certain shimmer to those scenes,” he said, describing a palpable sense of humidity. Because of the extensive camera movement Spielberg wanted, Daviau was especially conscious of his lighting, but “when you’re dealing with real exterior light, you’re going to have to rely on your timing in the lab. I did use an 85 filter, but I also prefer to add color in the lab, working on the theory that it is easier to warm up an image than cool it off. I also tend to agree with something Ansel Adams said: ‘The negative is the score and the print is the performance.’” For his work on The Color Purple, Daviau earned his second Oscar nomination. In 1986, Daviau reteamed with Spielberg on Empire of the Sun (AC Jan. ’88), based on the autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard. The story documents the experiences of a young English boy (Christian Bale) in China during World War II, when he is separated from his parents during the Japanese invasion and sent to a POW camp. The production filmed in England, Spain and China, and Daviau found working in the latter country to be an exceptional lesson in logistics. “Getting people and equipment in and out of China took months of advance planning,” he said. “We understood in November [of 1986] that we wouldn’t be shooting until March [of 1987], but the decision of what equipment had to go to China had to be made right then, because equipment going by sea took three months to get around the world.” Lab services posed another problem. The solution was to use an air shuttle that allowed Daviau to send everything to Technicolor London: “Each night, if we cut off at a certain point in the afternoon, we could make a flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong to London. That way, I could get a report on Monday’s footage by late Wednesday afternoon.” Unfortunately, this circuit did not work in the opposite direction. “We had no dailies during our three-plus weeks in Shanghai. That’s one reason a cinematographer must learn to trust what he sees when he’s standing by the camera.” Fortunately, Daviau also had the keen eyes of Technicolor’s Bob Crowdy and editor Michael Kahn to back him up.
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