18 studentfilmmakers 2010, Vol. 5, No. 1 2010, Vol. 5, No. 1 studentfilmmakers 1�

Renowned cinematographer John

Bailey, ASC has compiled over 70 credits

including Ordinary People, American

Gigolo, The Big Chill, Brighton Beach

Memoirs, The Accidental Tourist, In the

Line of Fire, Forever Mine, As Good As

It Gets, The Producers, Brief Interviews

with Hideous Men, and the upcoming

films When In Rome and Ramona and

Beezus.

In this exclusive interview, Mr.

Bailey talks about his work on Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men, John

Krasinski’s directorial debut, which

garnered a nomination for the Sundance

Film Festival 2009 Grand Jury Prize,

and recently secured U.S. distribution

in a deal with IFC Films.

Could you tell us about Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men, and

how this project came to you?

John Bailey, ASC: I met John

[Krasinski] when we were in pre-

production doing screen tests for

License to Wed, [which is] directed by

Ken Kwapis, who I’ve known, he’s a

very good friend, and we had worked on

Traveling Pants, and did a film a long,

long time ago in the 80s. And he told

me, ‘you know, John [Krasinski] found

this interesting part that he wants

to do after License to Wed and when

they go on hiatus from “The Office” in

November…’ And so, when I met John,

we talked about it, and he gave me the

script. And then I went out and I bought

the novel.

It’s based on a David Foster Wallace

novel. He wrote a really similar novel

ten years ago called “Infinite Jest”

(1996). He’s a very major writer for the

generation of writers in their 30’s and

40’s. A few years after that [“Infinite

Jest”], he wrote this book called “Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men,” which

is really a compilation of interviews of

men talking about their relationships

with women. And it’s unplotted. It’s

non-narrated in the sense that it’s just

a series of monologues. It’s different men

with numbers basically.

Purportedly, they are the results

of interviews that some unnamed

interviewer has compiled. And they’re

done in different kinds of voices,

different styles of writing. It’s a kind

of an experimental work in a way. But

the interesting thing is that there’s no

central, driving dramatic or narrative

line to it. And John found the book when

he was a student at Brown University.

He became very taken with it, and

eventually was able to option the novel

from David Foster Wallace who at the

time never optioned any of his work.

And John got a friend of his from

Brown to independently put up the $2

million dollars to make this movie, and

he asked me to do it. And John is very,

very well-connected with a lot of really

extraordinary actors in his group, you

know, in his age group, in their 20’s and

30’s. He basically has gone to a number

of them and has cast them to play

different men.

Insights into Lighting and Anamorphic 35mm ShootingExclusive Q&A with John Bailey, ASC –

Director of Photography for

“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”

They’re extraordinary roles because,

with the exception of like one character,

none of them have a real through line

all the way through the movie. They’re

episodic; and they’re either literal

kind of monologues of these interviews

that they have, which can be quite

lengthy, or the monologues are actually

dramatized. John is open about the

dramatizing and he gets creative for the

sake of an entertainment movie, you

know, a narrative line movie. He has

created the character of the interviewer

who is a graduate student, a woman,

who has simply taken on this idea of

interviewing a wide variety of men

about their relationships with women

as her doctoral dissertation. And John

simply took sections from the interviews

from the novel, and then, created

additional material himself and has

created a screenplay that is partly very

literally taken from the novel and part

completely created.

We just finished this second week of

a four-week schedule. And so the budget

is $2 million, and it’s a 20-day schedule,

which is, you know, pretty ambitious.

And because so much of it revolves

around episodes of people sitting in a

room talking, or different environments,

essentially being interviewed, and a good

amount of it is talking heads, we knew

we had to kind of find a way of doing

that to not seem like a documentary

kind of talking head. And so very early

on, I suggested to John, I said, I know

we have very limited budget, but I think

I can get some of my equipment vendors,

especially Panavision, and basically I’ve

worked with them for decades, to help

us out because I’d like to shoot this film

on 35mm film in the anamorphic aspect

ratio which is the aspect ratio I’ve used

on all the films I’ve done in the last 15

years. And even though this is a very

small, intimate film, I think that the

anamorphic aspect ratio will kind of

give it a kind of scale and a theatrical

quality that will keep it from being

claustrophobic. And John just got very

excited about that and signed on to that

right away.

So, we had this little film that by

most contemporary definitions on what

you should do on that kind of schedule

and that kind of budget are usually

being shot nowadays all in video or

digital video, high def. And, I did not

really want to do that. I knew it would

be a challenge for us to actually shoot

Pictured: John Bailey, ASC. Photo credit: Robert Primes, ASC.

Behind the scenes of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. (L-R) Julianne Nicholson, Dominic Cooper, and director-writer-actor John Krasinski on set with John Bailey, ASC

(center) and first assistant director Thomas Fatone (far right). (Photo by JoJo Whilden.)

Close-up

20 studentfilmmakers 2010, Vol. 5, No. 1

it, say, the way we would a $40 million

movie. That’s where the skill interest in

terms of, I wouldn’t say technical level,

but in terms of the technical-artistic

level is with this film because it’s really

cutting against the grain of how very

low budget films are being made now.

I did a documentary with Errol

Morris ten years ago [A Brief History of

Time (1991)]. Stephen Hawking’s book

is “A Brief History of Time.” And that’s

almost all interviews with people and

talking heads, with friends and family

and fellow cosmologists and scientists of

Hawkings, and we’ve constructed these

very simple tools instead of shooting

on practical locations, which gave me

the opportunity to light each of these

situations, each of these interviews,

with these different people in a very

different way. It’s not like going in with

a camera, and someone goes, ‘oh, this is

horrible,’ and bringing up a couple lights

and shooting it. I was able to create a

very interesting, dramatic environment.

And this film, Brief Interviews with

Hideous Men has a component of that

with regards to lighting. And, A Brief

History of Time is kind of a lighting

antecedent to this in a good part of the

film of people just sitting and talking

to someone off camera. And, I’m trying

to create an environment that achieves

settings through the lighting.

Brief Interviews with Hideous

Men is independently financed and

produced?

John Bailey, ASC: A college friend

of John’s, Kevin Connors, he was a fellow

student and long-time friend of John’s.

John has wanted to make this film for

over 5 years, from the time he was a

student at Brown. I don’t know at what

point Kevin came on board with this,

but essentially, he became impassioned

by John’s enthusiasm for the project

and wanted to become involved in

some capacity in making the film. So

he essentially privately financed it. So

there was no studio oversight. Kevin is

actually the Executive Producer.

You said that you’re shooting the

film on 35mm in anamorphic aspect

ratio. Could you elaborate on this?

John Bailey, ASC: The aspect

ratio is the ratio between the height of

the film, in other words, the vertical

dimension and the horizontal dimension.

So 1.85 means that if the vertical is,

say, 1 meter, the horizontal dimension

would be 1.85, a little under 2 meters,

almost twice as wide. That’s a normal

widescreen. The new video high def

to widescreen TV’s that are in are

slightly less wide than that. They’re

actually 1.78, which is odd because when

this whole thing, the consideration of

widescreen high def television came up

a number of years ago, Sony unilaterally

decided for whatever reasons that they

were going to do what they call 16:9,

which is essentially 1.78. They didn’t

really consult with the film industry

which already had its widescreen

standard of 1.85, but unilaterally did

this, and they were hearing for the FCC,

which completely copped out on it and

essentially said they did not want to set

the standard, they would let the industry

decide. So the creative community kind

of lost that balance, but we now have

films that are being shot for theatres

at 1.85 and essentially then are being

shown on television at 1.78. It’s a very

small difference. It’s certainly not the

difference in, say, between the normal in

what we think of as a square TV. And

a square TV is essentially the same

aspect ratio as what movies were in the

black-and-white era and the early color

era, which is 1.33. It looks like a square

screen, but it’s really not, it’s 1.33. So,

that’s kind of for a background.

In the early 50’s, TV was starting

to be a threat to theatrical distribution.

Scene from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Close-up

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22 studentfilmmakers 2010, Vol. 5, No. 1

Twentieth Century Fox decided to

develop a very widescreen format, which

they called CinemaScope. And that

was the first commercial anamorphic

process. And anamorphic means you

take on your regular picture your

photographing lens which is what’s called

a spherical lens, which means that the

image you capture is like normal video

camera and like normal still camera.

It’s accurately represented. That’s called

a spherical lens system. They came up

with what they called CinemaScope

which essentially squeezed the image

almost 2:1. And so, maybe you’ve seen on

television or something at the beginning

or end of the film on television where

they have all the credits and they run

them and you see for a few minutes of

a film everything looks kind of skinny?

Well, that’s what is actually on the film.

And they do that so you can read the

credits. That’s an anamorphic squeeze.

So, you add to the spherical lens, you

add an extra element which squeezes

the picture together and allows you

essentially to get an image that is

twice as wide as it would be normally.

And that’s an anamorphic process, and

the first commercial one was called

CinemaScope.

In the late 50’s, several other

squeezed or anamorphic systems came

out. Todd-AO developed one. But the

most successful one became Panavision.

And Panavision initially was strictly

an anamorphic lens system. And then

in the 60’s, they developed a normal

spherical system.

So, when you talk about anamorphic,

you’re usually talking about a Panavision

squeezed lens system. And the aspect

ratio is 2.40:1. So you see, it’s a lot wider

than 1.85.

Then there’s now a way to essentially

get an anamorphic release print image

by actually shooting the film with a

spherical lens system and extracting it

at post production. And a lot of people

are doing that.

But I love the anamorphic lens

system. One of the things that’s

wonderful about anamorphic – let’s

see, 1.85 was developed as a reaction

to the 20th Century Fox CinemaScope

system, and it came from a poor man’s

widescreen. And all they did was they

took the normal 35mm frame and they

just cut more off the top and the bottom.

So you have maybe 40 percent of the

frame that’s just black. And that’s how

they developed 1.85. So if you compare

1.85 to anamorphic which uses the

entire vertical frame, like 16mm, you

know, with a frame line that’s very,

very fine, the anamorphic frame, 4-

perforation frame, has almost 50 percent

more information picture area. So it has

higher resolution. And I like it because

of that, and because of other sort of

aesthetic reasons.

But it’s a system that has been in

place since 1953. The first Hollywood

studio film that was filmed in the

CinemaScope process was The Robe.

And I’ve been using it ever since

1989. The first film I did in anamorphic

was called The Accidental Tourist. The

film with Bill Hurt and Geena Davis.

And I love the anamorphic aspect

ratio. I’ve become a real exponent of it,

and it’s usually used for larger budget

films. One of the things I wanted to do

with this film [Brief Interviews with

Hideous Men], which had a very small

budget, was to demonstrate that not only

did you not have to shoot a low budget

film in high def video, that you could

shoot it on 35mm film; but even more,

you could shoot it in the anamorphic

aspect ratio.

So it was an artistic, technical

decision. I wanted to demonstrate to

Scene from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Close-up

other filmmakers, and maybe young,

emerging filmmakers that might only

have 2 or 3 million dollars to make a

movie, which is a lot of money still but,

you know, by studio standards, of course,

it’s nothing. And even by indie standards

today it’s not very much money. Even a

lot of low budget indie films are in the 5

to 7 million-dollar range.

So I just kind of wanted to show,

yes, you can make a widescreen film

in 35mm anamorphic in 20 days for $2

million. So that’s kind of the challenge

I took on, and I presented it to John

Krasinski, and he was very excited

about it. The producers were a little bit

uncertain because it was not the normal

way these things are done. Now, a lot of

these low budget films are shot on one

video format or another, but I convinced

them that one of the things that was

very important in this film is that it’s

mainly people talking, it’s talking heads

and interviews, was that it looked very

stylish, that beyond film it has that

transparency and luminosity of film,

and that it have a big screen look, so

that it wouldn’t seem claustrophobic.

You said that Brief Interviews

with Hideous Men has a component

of how you did the lighting for A

Brief History of Time. Could you

talk about that a little bit more?

John Bailey, ASC: A Brief History

of Time, which is sort of a film biography

of the life and work of Stephen Hawking,

essentially was a series of interviews

of talking heads of family and friends

and fellow scientists and cosmologists.

And, it was done in a very kind of

stylized environment. We did not shoot

it in actual homes and offices. We built a

series of two-walled sets that essentially

had no apparent relationship to what

you would expect to be the environment

of the person who was being interviewed.

And it was all done on stage.

Errol Morris and I decided to

photograph these interviews in a very

kind of stylized way, and not necessarily

make them look like they were in a

normal office or a normal house or

something. So I had tremendous freedom

to light the set and the person we were

interviewing in whatever kind of almost

arbitrary way I wanted to. Totally not

naturalistic, you know, not realistic.

And they seemed to not necessarily bear

any connection to the space that the

interviewee was sitting in. And Errol and

I did that because we essentially wanted

to kind of displace the interviewee and

the environment from any consideration

that it was like realistic. That we were

talking so basically about Hawking’s

life. Like even more so, it’s about his

ideas, which are certainly metaphysical

and abstract. So we were trying to lend

a component in the lighting that was

almost sort of surreal, not necessarily

surrealistic, but not realistic. It

would kind of match the nature in the

interview. They were talking about time

and space and mathematics and black

holes and stuff like that.

So, even though Brief Interviews

with Hideous Men is a normal, dramatic

kind of plot, a thing with realistic

characters, and you can tell from what

you’ve read in the book, it is not a

normal kind of plotted novel. It’s very

episodic. It’s kind of discontinuous.

And, every person who is talking is a

completely different kind of person and

talks in a completely different kind of

way. And the actual structure in the

novel, the writing, the way it’s formatted

even, is slightly different. Some of the

interviews have enormous footnotes in

them. Some of them are written in kind

of almost an email style. And others are

very traditional. So, I wanted to find

a way to have the interviews in Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men also seem

kind of slightly abstracted. So, there

is a component in the way we did the

lighting in the shooting of them that is

not completely naturalistic.

So that’s kind of a connection. Both of

the movies essentially deal with talking

heads. In the case of A Brief History of

Time, it’s dealing with metaphysical

ideas in terms of the nature of the

universe and time and space. Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men is dealing

with a kind of almost metaphysical

discussion of the nature of man-woman

relationships. In other words, a lot of

2� studentfilmmakers 2010, Vol. 5, No. 1 2010, Vol. 5, No. 1 studentfilmmakers 25

discussion is not terribly specific to one

person talking about another person,

but it’s more generalized.

What is it like working with a

new director and particularly John

Krasinski?

John Bailey, ASC: Well, I did a lot

of films with first time directors, and I

like doing them very much because a lot

of times, of course, the first time director

is also the author of the screenplay. In

this case, John took an existing novel,

but he very freely adapted it, and at

least half of the screenplay is really

John’s original work. The other half

is essentially taken from the text of

the novel. So, there’s always a kind of

excitement and a sense of discovery and

real energy that I find working with a

first time director who is also the author

of the material because it’s usually

something that comes from somewhere

deep in his or her psyche. Something

needs to get out. It’s usually not just, ‘oh,

you know, I’m gonna write a screenplay.’

Just like a first novel. The first novel

tends to come from the author’s own

experience more or less. And, ‘first

movies’ tend to be a lot like that. And in

the case of John. I’m not saying John has

qualities of any of the men in the film

but, you know, I think that all men can

recognize elements of themselves and

certainly of the male sexual dynamics

in these characters. And John seemed

absolutely fascinated with this material

when he was a student and decided he

felt he could make a movie out of it. And

apparently, he spent five years trying to

convince David Foster Wallace’s agent

that he could do it. And they finally gave

him the rights.

So, what it is like,… it is an incredible

momentum. In other words, I’m getting

on board with a first time director,

especially somebody like John who had

such a passion to do this. I’m getting

on board a train that’s already rolling

at apparently a high rate of speed. And

I’m trying to hang on. It’s a lovely sense

of there being energy and momentum

propelling this thing down the track at

the time I get on for the journey. I kinda

like that a lot.

To come with it, John has many,

many ideas and many kinds of thoughts

that he’s had about how the film should

be structured and so forth because he’s

been living with it for so long.

What do you ‘don’t want’ when

working with a first time director?

John Bailey, ASC: Well, the very

thing that is so fascinating is this

momentum and this vision that a first

time director can have, having created

his own material, and which I really

want to become a part of, help fulfill,

also has the potential of a pitfall if

the director has kind of ossified and

solidified too much in his or her vision

of the material, so that when other

people come on, there’s really no space

for you to kind of be a creative part.

And that’s okay up to a certain extent,

but a lot of times actually making the

movie as a collaborative process is very

different from whatever intensive kind

of preparation he might have done as the

author or would-be director of the film.

So the pitfall in a situation like that is

essentially coming onto a director that

is so hurt and so solid about the vision

of the material that there’s nowhere for

you to go with it.

That didn’t happen on this film

of course. But that is the thing that

I’m always looking for as kind of a

cautionary thing. Many times you just

have to evaluate that.

Taking into consideration the

schedule, what would you say was

the biggest challenge that came

up during the filming of Brief

Scene from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Close-up

Interviews with Hideous Men that’s

the most interesting to you and that

you would like to share?

John Bailey, ASC: One of the big

challenges was that a key role of Sara’s

ex-boyfriend, the character, Ryan…

John had no intention to actually act

in the film, only to play a very small

part, one of the minor interviewees.

Jason [who was originally cast for the

character, Ryan] decided he wasn’t able

to do it shortly before we started, and

John said, ‘you know, I really don’t know

where else to go with such a difficult

role.’ So he decided to take it on himself.

And, in terms of page count, it’s a huge

role.

When you get to the end of the novel,

there’s a whole description of a scene

where one character is talking about

a woman he had a brief relationship

with who had been kidnapped, held at

knife point, and had been raped out in

the woods. And he talks about how she

realized that in order to survive, she

was going to have to find some way to

achieve empathy with the man who was

violating her. This became an actual

scene where the character, Ryan, tells

Sara this at the end of the movie.

And so, John decided to take this role

on himself, in addition to directing the

movie. It wasn’t that many days work,

but it was a huge, huge scene. And, you

know, we were all very worried about

it. In terms of John being able to direct

and act. It was essentially a monologue.

It was like an eight-page monologue. A

lot of stuff to learn. Essentially Sara

was not talking, she was just listening

to him tell this story.

So, I had met John on a film called

License to Wed (2007) that Ken Kwapis

directed. That’s how John and I came

together. And, John and Ken kind of

got into conversation, and it turned

out that Ken was free the beginning of

December. And Ken volunteered to come

back to New York and direct John for

the two days that he was in this big final

scene. And so it freed John for the most

part to be able to just be the actor in

that scene, which was really necessary.

And then Ken and I, who had done – it

was our third film together – and so we

had a real shorthand way of working.

Ken came right in for those two days

essentially, directed that long scene. So,

that was the biggest kind of challenge of

the entire making of the film.

Of course, every day had its

challenges because we had so much to do

every day. I mean, we hardly ever had a

day that had less than five pages to do.

One day we shot over 11 pages.

What was your most favorite

scene to light in Brief Interviews

with Hideous Men and why?

John Bailey, ASC: I guess my

favorite was the actual scenes in

the interview room, and some of the

characters, usually the ones with the

numbers, #15, #40. Or men actually

sitting at a table in a very stripped down

room against a kind of a brick wall or

kind of grey to brick wall just sitting

there talking, and it was essentially a

two-wall for that. And it was very much

kind of like interviews in A Brief History

of Time except the set was the same, it

never changed, which is a table, a chair,

a wall. But what I was able to do was

use a completely different kind of light

for each one of the interviews. So even

though the shots were the same, and

the image sizes were the same, and the

camera angle and lens were the same,

for each of those interviews, I was able

to create different a mood and feel just

by virtue of the lighting.

(L-R) Writer-director Shana Feste and cinematographer John Bailey, ASC on the set of The Greatest. (Photo by Jojo Whildon.)