Original subtitles

Hi, I'm Larry Smith.

I was the director of photography on Eyes Wide Shut.

♪♪ [slow, somber string music]

♪♪ [mournful chant playing backward]

[Smith] I didn't know anybody in this business.

Like most kids growing up, we were introduced to television in the '50s.

One person in our street had a television,

and we would all gather around this little, 12-inch Pye screen

and watch it up on the top of a refrigerator.

So that was my first introduction regarding the moving image.

My path was always

I was going to be a footballer, but I was never really good enough.

I didn't know what I was going to do,

but a couple of friends of mine, who were a couple of years older,

they were doing electrical apprenticeships.

I got an apprenticeship with the London Electricity Board,

and at the same time I would be doing some freelance work on movies.

♪♪ [soft ominous drumming]

I got the call around 1973, 1974, for Barry Lyndon,

as a friend of mine was the gaffer on it.

He said, "We've got to get all these sets ready.

Would you come in for a couple of days and help us get the sets ready?"

And then that week became another week,

and that week became another week and then another week.

And by the time I first laid eyes on Stanley

was probably about three months later.

And I remember very clearly,

he pulled up this one day

and I was inside, looking out of this window,

and this Mercedes pulled up

and he got out,

pretty much dressed the way he always dressed in those days.

He used to wear a big, green, parka-type anorak

with fur around the hood.

But immediately I saw the reverence that people had.

You could cut it with a knife.

And then, of course, he came into the set

and I realized everybody was at attention, more or less.

It was fascinating to watch.

I realized I'd better learn a bit more about this guy.

So working with Stanley, it can be quite straightforward.

He didn't expect you to be Einstein.

He just expected you to be committed,

care about what you did.

His theory on life is,

we as human beings,

we can do anything we want.

We can learn a skill to do whatever we want.

Even though he was an extremely intelligent man,

he never thought that other people couldn't be

as intelligent in their own way.

♪♪ [lively classical]

[Smith] Lou Bogue, the gaffer,

was sick.

He got sick for a few days.

So I kind of got dragged to the front and took over Lou's role.

And that was really the beginning of a more permanent relationship.

Towards the end of Barry Lyndon,

John Alcott and Lou were contracted to do another movie,

so they left.

And I took over that role, as the gaffer.

That was really where the bond came, I would say,

from that last month or so of Barry Lyndon.

And then doing some

preliminary work on what was to be The Shining.

I still really wasn't in the camera department at this time.

I was somewhere between a gaffer and a novice DP,

because I was doing some of the work that a DP would be doing,

but without the responsibility of exposing the film

and being responsible for whether the film was exposed correctly or not.

After The Shining, I was developing my own company.

By this time, it had been around about 13 years,

working with Stanley 13, 14 years almost nonstop.

When you know Stanley the way the inner circle of people knew him,

you could get a phone call at four in the morning

or you might not hear from him for the rest of your life.

But when you get a phone call, it's not a surprise.

He said, "I'm very interested in shooting on 16mm, what do you think?" And I said...

I said, "Yeah, it's got its benefits, it's good, you know...

But there's some upside and downside to it."

Knowing the way Stanley shoots, in the back of my mind I'm thinking,

"I can't ever see you shooting on 16mm, Stanley."

He said to me,

"Have you got time to come up to the house?"

I said, "Stanley, I can't, I'm just about to go to the gym."

And, you know, Stanley wasn't someone that went to the gym,

and he was a bit flabbergasted by it.

"Why would you go to the gym?

We're talking film here. We're talking movies." It was, like,

beyond his comprehension.

We went out to see

the exterior of what became the gates on Eyes Wide Shut,

which was at the Spencer estate, Lady Diana Spencer's house.

[gate man] Good evening, sir.

[Bill] Good evening.

[gate man] Can we be of any help?

Well, I suppose you'd like the password.

If you'd like, sir.

Fidelio.

Thank you, sir. We'll run you up to the house.

[Smith] And we were just outside and he said to me,

"How would you light this if you were doing this at night?"

And I told him how I would do it. I said I'd put a big,

Wendy light-type,

Musco light-type,

a long, long way away,

just to give it a very soft wash.

And then, if we had...

whatever else we might use. There might be gate lights and things like that."

And he went, "Hmm."

Stanley was always very interested in lights. He didn't like big lights.

Even though it was a necessity

in the things I'd already shot with him, like Barry Lyndon,

But he loved small lights.

He loved low lights.

He loves lights that had multifunctions.

[Bill] Good evening.

- Password, sir? - [baritone voice chanting faintly]

Fidelio.

Thank you, sir.

[Smith] And then a period of time went by,

and I was at Pinewood Studios,

I was walking past one of the studios, and June Randall,

who was Stanley's longtime continuity girl,

called me over.

She saw me walking by and she called me over.

And she said,

"You're going to do Stanley's next movie, aren't you?"

And I went,

"What movie?"

Six, nine months later, I get another call.

And then the subject got broached about Eyes Wide Shut.

So we kind of talked a little bit about it.

At this stage he hadn't said to me,

"Do you want to shoot this movie I'm going to be doing, Eyes Wide Shut?"

It was a kind of...

We talked around it more than anything.

Two or three days later, Jan called me.

"Stanley wants to know, are you interested in doing this movie?"

So I said, "Is he asking me to?"

Because I'm still shocked.

So he said, "Yeah, he wants you to make a deal."

I didn't know it was called Eyes Wide Shut,

and at that time I didn't know Tom and Nicole were in it.

He said to me, "Read it on your own.

Don't read it with your family around you. Read it in a quiet room."

♪♪ [band playing mellow jazz music]

[sniffles]

Good evening, sir. Would you like a table, or would you like to sit at the bar?

- I'd like a table. - Please, follow me.

[coughs]

[Smith] It's set at Christmas,

and immediate for me as a cinematographer,

imagining the colors...

[Bill] Thank you.

Could I get you anything to drink?

[Smith] The early conversations that we had was about film stocks,

and I was using two film stocks at that time:

5298,

before the Vision stock that most people use today,

and I was using the 800ASA stock.

That's it for tonight, ladies and gentlemen.

On the bass...

[Smith] I had pushed that a little bit, a couple of times, the 800,

and it did push, but never more than about...

I think the maximum, maybe a stop, if that,

maybe half a stop.

I know where that is.

[Smith] What this basically means is

you leave the film stock in the chemicals for a longer time,

getting maximum brightness out of the print.

Okay, sir. Thank you. Bye-bye.

What is this?

It's the name of a Beethoven opera, isn't it?

[Smith] Forced development is not a science.

It can have an effect on being slightly over- or slightly underexposed.

From a DP's point of view,

you don't want that.

Stanley being Stanley,

who knew every aspect of film,

every aspect of developing film, manipulating film,

knew we can print to 50.

If it's too bright, we can print it down to 50.

And of course, he's right.

You can.

But most directors wouldn't have a clue about that.

A lot of DPs wouldn't have had the confidence to take that route.

But he could.

In terms of what grain might get thrown up by forced developing,

we probably only understood what it would be like

after we did the lighting tests of the opening scene,

of that whole thing-- the party scene, they come down the stairs.

And of course, you could see the grain. The grain was there.

Do you know anyone here?

[band playing elegant jazz music]

[Bill] Not a soul.

[Smith] And then it's a question of,

is there less on one-stop forced development

than there is on two?

Yes, there was.

Should we compromise

on one stop or two stop?

And I think Stanley's view was, for the difference,

he'd rather take the extra stop,

the working stop,

and not worry about the extra grain. He was very comfortable with the grain.

We did lighting tests at the end of every day,

almost every day of shooting.

The discussions Stanley and I had about how we saw things,

we both were 100% in agreement on

faces never look correct when they're correctly exposed.

They always look better underexposed.

♪♪ [foreboding bare piano line]

Thinking about that, I didn't realize he was talking about pushing it two stops

throughout the movie,

whether we were shooting at T2 to T2.2, as we were most of the time,

or 5.6, 8,

daylight scenes, day exteriors.

There would be absolutely no reason and no logic.

So his argument was,

we could get the look we want,

and we can steal that extra stop if we need it.

I'd been using

a lot of theatrical colors on things.

I like the theatrical blues,

the saturated oranges.

When I was lighting Tom's apartment,

I'd put some full CT blues on there.

And this time I just added a double, just to have a look at it.

And Stanley came on the set

and I said, "I've just put these blues on this light,

but it's probably too much."

He immediately saw it and he just loved it.

He said, "Why don't we do that?"

So I said, "Well, we can. We're going to need to use a lot of filter,

and it is going to burn through, " because they were fairly close to the lights,

as correction filters do.

But he loved it, and we kept with it all the way through, basically.

It was a happy accident, really.

It's okay.

- It's okay. - [panting]

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry I woke you up, but I thought you were having a nightmare.

Oh, God.

[groans] I just had such a horrible dream.

[Smith] He would say,

"Well, it's not real, Larry, but it's interesting."

And that was a term he would use a lot.

The bedroom scene we rehearsed a lot.

I mean, more than I've seen

any scene in any other movie, and particularly with Stanley.

We rehearsed...

Just the coming in,

literally coming in to get into the room,

we rehearsed

over days before we shot.

They are husband and wife, so obviously it made life easier.

But how do you make it realistic?

[Bill] Ziegler wasn't feeling too well.

[Smith] The money was spent getting to where we are.

What we're doing now is the cheapest part for him.

So why would we rush it?

You know, that was...

That was baked into his DNA.

Why would we rush this?

And the reason he could do that was the fact that,

this is where the smart producer came in,

he would save all this money on smaller crews,

on getting the best deals he could,

getting the longest deals he could for the studio.

Because I'm a beautiful woman,

the only reason any man ever wants to talk to me

is because he wants to fuck me?

Is that what you're saying?

[Smith] When she went to the window and then went on her knees, that was-

Nicole threw that in, and Stanley liked it.

So it was a scene that evolved,

because we didn't just shoot it and, "That's it, we've done that."

She was acting,

without the restraints of the script.

And then Sydney Pollack got cast,

which was to me incredible because I was a big fan of Sydney's work anyway.

His body of work I think is underestimated.

He was always taking photographs, Sydney.

When you think about a director like Sydney Pollack,

he was in awe of Stanley.

Tom had had to go away for a week,

so we decided, "It's a good time, let's rehearse this week with Sydney."

And I said to him,

"Sydney, how long do you think you would take to shoot this movie?"

By that time, we'd been shooting- I don't know for how long.

"If it was Warner Brothers," he said, "I'd probably get ten weeks."

Then he said to me, "What do you think?" I said, "I thought maybe 16 weeks."

He said, "Ten weeks, probably. I'd take 12 weeks, obviously."

And he said, "But then two things might happen."

He said, "if I didn't shoot for a week,"

the first thing that would happen is I'd get fired."

He said, "Then the second thing that would happen is I'd get sued."

Listen, Bill,

nobody killed anybody.

Someone died. It happens all the time.

But life goes on.

It always does.

Until it doesn't.

[laughs] But you know that, don't you?

[Smith] We went through the whole, "Who's going to do Steadicam?

Who's the best people around?"

And Liz's name came up.

♪♪ [orchestral waltz]

Honey, have you seen my wallet?

[Smith] She had this very interesting bodysuit.

It was like a suit of armor,

designed for a woman's body, that she would wear,

that obviously gave her back support.

Stanley was quite intrigued by it.

And she came on and she shot maybe as much as half the movie.

♪♪ [slow, somber string music]

♪♪ [ominous baritone chant]

[Smith] Originally, that's an old stately home that was given to a maharaja.

Hadn't been used for a long time.

It was so cold in there, and we were shooting nights.

I'd say minimum of two weeks, maybe longer.

They put big space heaters in there.

Those big gas things that you put in to dry spaces out,

20, 30, 40 of them, because we had lots of areas that we were using,

just to get the place habitable.

And it had this big high ceiling, domed ceiling,

very high, very, very high.

Then it was, "How are we going to light it? What are we going to do?"

You see the way all of the extras in the masked ball,

they're all around the balconies, they're all around the circle.

And we used wide-angle lenses. So where are you going to put the lights?

There's all this ornate part. There was nowhere to rig.

I'd seen this big dome up there,

and we got somebody up on the roof to see the feasibility

of dropping something under the dome.

I'd been using a moving light.

It was a 1.2 HMl,

but it had a lens on it and you could put different gobos in it,

and you could move it. It was a rock-and-roll light, basically.

Anyway, we got one up there and we put it down.

Liked the look of it, liked the fact it did this beautiful circle,

because it was a perfect circle.

Got it as wide as we physically could.

And then, "So what do we want to cover here? How do we want to cover?"

And that was all, predominantly all Steadicam.

[woman] Take me.

I am ready to redeem him.

[Smith] I thought it worked beautifully.

[guests murmuring]

You are ready to redeem him?

Yes.

[guests murmuring]

A difficult film to end.

Stanley's not the sort of person that would have shot multiple endings.

He wouldn't have done that,

which is also another reason why

he doesn't over-cover.

He's not...

Personally, I find it so refreshing not to shoot every angle.

You scratch your nose, you've got to have a close-up.

I love the fact that he never kept going in big close-ups.

I love the fact that he's...

A long lens to him was an 18mm.

It wasn't, but, I mean, he never shot much more past 50mm,

on a zoom or something, occasionally.

I think one of the reasons:

so people couldn't recut his movies.

I'm sure in the back of his mind... He was always ahead of the game, always thinking,

"What could people do with this if there's this extra footage?"

I went off to shoot something

and Stanley said to me, "Look, where will you be?"

And I was in the West Indies,

and he said, "I might need to talk to you."

"Might need to talk to you." Of course he's going to talk to me.

And, "I might need some... Can you take the notes?"

So I had to take all my notes with me,

which took up half a suitcase.

And of course he called me the very first morning, and I'm working,

he called me and said, "How did we do that?

What did we expose that at? What was this and what was that?"

I was up in Manchester. I came down to my house in London.

I was trying to absorb all of this.

And the shock.

And after the shock of it, the shock of... that he had died last night,

I didn't quite know what to do,

so I called the house.

And of course the phone was busy.

I called everybody. I called all the mobile phones I could,

and then Tony, I think, called me back and he told me

exactly everything that happened,

from Stanley being extremely happy.

He said, "I hadn't seen Stanley laugh

or whistle or be happy for such a long time."

He was so relieved,

the pressure of making this movie.

I guess he went and had a nice dinner with Christiane, he was happy, and...

and during that night, he passed.

♪♪ [orchestral waltz]

And I never really saw the movie until it was premiered in LA.

That's the first time I saw it, the big premiere with everybody there,

everybody that was anybody.

That was the first time I saw it.

It wasn't really a color grade.

Of course, I was very upset

that I couldn't go back and grade the film.

But to be honest, Stanley always graded his own films,

but this was a very different situation.

I don't know for sure what the end product would've looked like

had Stanley done it, I don't know.

I only know what I saw with my eye.

I got a phone call,

"Would I be interested in doing a regrade of Eyes Wide Shut

because of the rerelease and the new 4K version and all of that?"

Well, you can imagine my reaction.

I never thought this day would come, by the way.

But I've waited a long time.

I was so delighted, really, to come back and spend time

to try to get it the way Stanley might have wanted it.

And I think we've achieved that.

♪♪ [foreboding piano]

I think it's a very personal film for Stanley,

the very fact that he held on to it for as long as he did.

In hindsight, you might say he knew it was going to be his last film,

but I don't think that's the reason he made it.

And I'm not sure, had he not been unwell and passed away,

it would have been his last film.

He might well have done another film.

♪♪ [foreboding piano]

[piano fades]