Q&A w/Conrad L. Hall

"He said, 'So you're a hotshot cameraman?'" remembers Hall in a conversation we had last week. "I said, 'I don't know about that.' He said, 'You want to direct one day.' I said, 'I might be interested in that.' He asked me if I knew how hard the work was, and whether I was suited to it. I said, 'I don't know about that.' He said, 'Direct your own damn film. Don't direct mine.'"

Funny thing: Hall took Brooks' advice, and then again, he didn't. After nearly 50 years in the movie business, he has yet to direct his own feature; yet he's found a way to help other people realize their visions while simultaneously realizing his own. Cinema guides will tell you that Cool Hand Luke was directed by Stuart Rosenberg, Searching for Bobby Fischer by Steven Zaillian, Fat City by John Huston, In Cold Blood and The Professionals by Richard Brooks, Love Affair by Glenn Gordon Caron (and Warren Beatty) and American Beauty and Road to Perdition by Sam Mendes?and indeed they were. Yet each film is just as recognizably a Conrad Hall movie: sharp, rich, confident and unsettling. He embraces extremes, arranging characters along diagonal lines, framing them with shafts of light, often rack-focusing between them. In Hall's compositions, bright is bright and dark is black and raindrops are enormous. His style is at once lyrical and hard?very modern. It resists sentiment even when the film itself does not. The stories he shoots tend to involve troubled characters caught in no-win situations, but Hall looks at them with clear eyes.

"I'm a black and white cinematographer," he says. "I didn't change much when I switched to color."

You can judge for yourself Sept. 14-29, when the American Museum of the Moving Image runs its series "Master Class: The Art of Cinematography," which includes four films shot by Hall: The Day of the Locust (Sept. 28, 2 p.m.), In Cold Blood (Sept. 28 & 29, 7 p.m.), Fat City (Sept. 29, 2 p.m.) and Searching for Bobby Fischer (Sept. 29, 4:15 p.m.). And of course, there's Perdition, an unfashionably slow, morose summer hit that has divided people mainly because of its mythic style (it's based on the same-titled comic by Max Allan Collins, which was in turn inspired by the manga Lone Wolf and Cub). Some adore its fairytale sense of design, which makes every frame pop like a collage made from torn pieces of construction paper. (Hall says Perdition was "about 80 percent storyboarded.") Others have complained that the movie mistakes vagueness for myth, that it looks too burnished and that it too obviously wants to impress us.

In an age where critics habitually bemoan the decline of basic film craftsmanship, those seem odd qualities to gripe about, but no matter. In Perdition, as in Blade Runner, Days of Heaven and Apocalypse Now, style is substance and mood trumps all. The unfavorable comparisons to The Godfather are endearingly clueless; the movie Road to Perdition really wants to be is Night of the Hunter.

"Road to Perdition was a concocted story," Hall says. "In [an early version of] the script there was all this backstory about Ireland, and what happened to the Tom Hanks character, Michael, and his father, and how that connects with what's going on over here, plus a whole bunch of religious things, all of which Sam zapped right out of the script. He knows how to reduce a scene to a couple of lines and let the pictures do the rest. It was upsetting seeing it for the first time, because there were all these other elements he'd left out, too. But I put it together eventually, after seeing it four or five times. What Sam did with that movie was a good thing to do."

Born in 1926, Hall is the father of cinematographer Conrad W. Hall, who photographed Panic Room, and the son of novelist Norman Hall, author of Mutiny on the Bounty and other works. He was born in Tahiti and lived there until age eight, when he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a condition that creates ulcers in the colon. Sent to the United States for treatment, he didn't see much of his father for years after that; the elder Hall died in 1951, shortly after his son graduated from film school at the University of Southern California.

Hall realizes it may be no coincidence that he's drawn to stories about distant fathers, conflicted fathers and makeshift father figures, from Cool Hand Luke and Fat City through Bobby Fischer, American Beauty and Perdition. "I revered my father? When I first went to school, I wanted to try journalism to see if I could be like him. I found out I didn't have the brain matter that it took to master that kind of storytelling, but I fell into a different kind of storytelling."

Unlike some cinematographers, Hall likes to study a script long in advance to generate ideas not just on how the whole movie should be lit, but on how certain characters should be photographed; he also thinks about interesting transitions, to make the director's and editor's jobs easier. But throughout the process, he remains Conrad Hall. Like a strong lead actor, his own personality comes through even as he tries to adapt to the task at hand. He refuses to dwell on graphic violence, preferring to reveal it fleetingly, often from a distance. He dislikes sentimental displays in movies, and encourages directors and actors to let the light and space around them express deeper emotions.

"A lot of stage actors can be made into good film actors," he says, "but often they don't immediately understand how they can help their performance by accommodating the director and the cinematographer. I think of that scene from In Cold Blood where one of the killers, the Bobby Blake character, is about to be hanged. He gave a flat reading of his remembrance of his father. His emotion was projected onto his face, in the form of raindrops running down his cheek like tears. His performance in that scene was powerful because it was restrained?because he just stood there and paid attention to what was happening around him in the movie."

Hall's bold, easily recognizable style inspires resentment in some quarters. Early predictions that he's guaranteed another Oscar nomination for Perdition prompted grumblings among some critics that praising Hall was a kneejerk response, like praising De Niro just for showing up onscreen.

This is not a new reaction. "Pauline Kael said of my work on Cool Hand Luke, 'He can't just shoot a movie, he's got to make it a tour de force,'" Hall says, chuckling at the memory.

Being described as a "control freak"?a phrase applied to many a great director?doesn't seem to bug him much, either. "If you were in a plane, wouldn't you want your pilot to be a control freak? It's the same with a movie. If you're entrusted with a certain job, an important job, whether it's the cinematography or the direction, why would you want to leave it to someone else? Why would you want to leave it to the production designer, the costumer or anyone else? You should be in control of it."

"Master Class: The Art of Cinematography" runs Sept. 14-29 at the American Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Ave. (36th St.), Astoria, 718-784-0077, and includes work by Gordon Willis (All the President's Men, Sept. 15, 2 p.m.), Ellen Kuras (Summer of Sam, Sept. 21, 5 p.m.) and Ed Lachman (The Limey, Sept. 22, 2 p.m.). For more information, visit the museum's website at www.ammi.org.