Original subtitles

Do you mind if I sit down?

There's a point-of-view shot

through the binoculars that you put a dime in

on the top of the Empire State Building.

And you see a beautiful shot of the Flatiron Building,

and it's New York, and it's kind of classic.

The Empire State Building shows up

in so many of the other shots.

But he kind of drifts down the building,

and it's very, very beautiful.

A bird crosses into the frame,

and the camera just drifts off with the bird

and follows the bird through the sky.

That sense of presence and being in the moment

that clearly the cameraman had, whoever he was,

how was he free enough to capture that moment?

And then I started to notice it more and more

throughout his work.

You have to imagine a film before you make it.

Robby was the one person

with whom I imagined how the film would look.

Tried to find out the style of a movie.

For 10 years, we imagined every film before we made it.

Don't try to be a nice guy.

I wanna go home.

Let me love you for your money.

I'm confused!

Close the doors, they'll come in through the windows.

Does that one pull you from Rob?

Does that guide you toward Robby in some way?

In a different way, I would say.

It's more like sunlight coming through clouds or something

Yeah.

And that one is cloudier, like, diffuse.

A diffused light

Robby always loved and still does.

He loves cloudy days.

The idea was possibly to get an instrument

that somehow we felt relates to Robby in some way.

Good.

You know, there's a very playful spirit to Robby,

a very exciting spirit of finding things, of being...

thinking on your feet, with Robby, not planning everything.

Which is always, is a big part of Robby for me.

He's also very focused, and he can be moody as well.

So, you know, there's one Robby

with many parts to him.

We'll try to describe some parts of Robby with music.

I'll be thinking of Robby, feeling Robby somehow

when making some music.

Oh, I don't know, it's kind of abstract, Claire.

I would ask to borrow this one.

In the script it was just two lines.

And we both

didn't know that this was gonna be, these two lines

was gonna be our initiation to...

the road movie, we didn't know.

We didn't think so much of these two lines.

The man was taking a bus,

and the bus was crossing a railroad line,

and we said, oh, well we stopped the bus

and brought the camera outdoors so we could do a drive-by.

So these two lines became many, many shots,

and we would just do it on instinct, nothing was scripted.

Even the production manager was getting angry at us

because we kept doing new things that he didn't know about.

The bus had to stop at a roadhouse.

There was a beautiful interior with a bar

and a fantastic jukebox,

like I had never, ever seen it in my life.

And oh I said, "Robbie, let's, come on, come on.

"We have half an hour now, we can do a shot.

"How our goalkeeper hero goes to the jukebox

"and listens to a song."

We had discovered for ourselves

that you could make movies as you travel.

What attracted me was the kind of life you have in film.

Bohemian, bohemian life I liked very much.

Rolf, stop!

Yeah, Rolf stop!

One time, my girls!

One looks at the stats.

The Nuggets in fact prove their stage

from the field in that corner,

but it's at a measly 35% to San Antonio's 57.

Ray Rasmussen in the worst offender,

having made just one of his seven attempts.

I'm just happy every time I see him in the image too, you know?

And Robby's life in these hotel rooms too, you know?

It's a huge part of his life, as he just said.

You know he used to say,

working on films was just kind of like running away

to join the circus.

Because you then were on a trip for the rest of your life,

basically.

And these are the visuals of your...

where you live, you know?

I hope you're right, honey.

If we're following the wrong car,

we're gonna have to wait a whole other month.

I'll be eight then.

You'll be what?

I'll be eight then!

What do you think?

Yeah, could be.

I don't remember with Robby that we ever looked at another film

in order to decide on a style

for something we were gonna do.

I remember we looked at a lot of photographs.

We were both completely in love with Walker Evans

when we prepared "Kings of the Road."

We also looked at a lot of paintings.

The Dutch masters for me

were the greatest models for framing and also for light.

I remember how much we were both impressed

with Edward Hopper when we prepared "The American Friend."

And then I would leave it completely to Robby

to find the light.

And I never interfered

with any light that Robby suggested to me.

Sometimes he wasn't quite happy, and I realized,

and then I said, "Well, why don't you go on?

"And I'll give you a little,

I give you another half hour or so,

"if you need another hour, you take it."

To my child

There is nothing I can say

There's too much troubled mind

And there is nothing

I can do

When I talked to Robby about "American Friend,"

which I think impressed so many cinematographers,

how he captured this quality of color and atmosphere.

And I said, you know, "What did you do?"

He says,

"Do? We waited."

We scouted, we looked at the time of day

to take pictures, and he would determine

when the moment was there to shoot it.

Hi, good morning, Mr. Zimmerman.

I was expecting your call.

What I really liked about Robby

was when we were ready to light, he said, "Let's make light."

Now it's, "let's make light," and to me it was like,

okay, let's make love, you know.

So it was his love of light and camera

that motivated him.

He did lots of pictures where it was simply images of light.

You'd look at the image and say,

"That's a rather innocuous image."

Yes, but look at the light.

I was always attracted to stories

that had something to say about life.

The consequence of that was

try to look for directors

and stories

that really made sense for me,

that really enriched my life, too,

that got me thinking about what life was about.

I was hoping to show you that I was your father.

You showed me I was.

But the biggest thing I hoped for

can't come true.

I know that now.

You belong together with your mother.

Robby was just so powerful in who he is as a human being.

He has to tell the truth,

his lens, his camera, film was the truth.

How can I get as close as I can to a truth?

Your hair, it's wet.

Some people pushed hard for us to shoot a happy ending.

You see, Robby had been through a separation and divorce.

He knew the truth of that situation.

He encouraged me to keep the truthful ending.

The largest landslide ever witnessed by humans.

It sent gas, ash, and debris into the Washington sky,

and people on the mountain could hardly see or breathe.

What is this?

This is San Francisco. - San Francisco?

Sam and Dean.

It's Tuesday, it must be San Francisco.

No, it's Thursday. - How are you?

- Hello. - Pleased to meet you.

Good to see you brought your...

Do you know how to work it?

- Yeah, great. - Good, oh.

- I know that. - Okay.

Put it on the bed, so Robby can make pause.

Da da da!

- Yeah. - Yeah.

Wow.

- Perfect. - Presents.

Check out the goods.

These are old presents from Christopher.

Yeah.

Just 'cause I like you guys.

- See, look, look. - Yes, I see.

Where can I get this, though?

You know, this is a huge light taker, huh?

- It's a big one. - Could this...

Yeah yeah yeah, right, right right.

Come on, this is our day off.

I'm there with Christopher Porter and Pim

and someone else I don't recall.

But Robby, when it came to meters,

he even carried an old Weston.

So when he was really not sure about the spot meter,

I forget what circumstance brought it up,

but sometimes he'd whip out an old Weston.

This is from the 1920s or 1930s.

And it needed no batteries.

That was it, when the battery died,

there was still one fallback meter.

Robby was more interested in the light

that was being reflected.

His philosophy simply was

the film only sees reflected light,

it doesn't see incident light.

We would go all the way from overexposure

into underexposure, to the point where it was almost black,

and then we would look at that exposure range

and judge where we would lose detail

in the shadow areas

and where we would lose highlight details, so,

into the whites,

and this is your basic zone system.

It's used in still photography.

Ansel Adams wrote a lot about it.

The prime instrument for reading the light

was a Pentax spot meter.

They gave you a little digital readout

in EV or exposure value.

And so it was nine and two dots, or 10 and two dots.

And so the dialogue on set was,

"So what do you think the exposure, nine plus plus?

"Or nine plus, or nine, or..."

Don't hit me!

The one film that I did with Robby

that of course everybody seems to know,

that is "Barfly,"

where Robby had said at the beginning,

"If it looks forced or somehow constructed,

"we'll lose the audience.

"This is a film where I don't want the light

"to make itself known, to be that omnipresent.

"It should be so natural,

and we need to take our time with this."

Natural energy, ladies man!

You're right.

When we started "Barfly,"

I had a semi trailer full of tungsten light.

I had twin 750-amp generators on there.

We had enough power to sink a ship.

But this was going to be a very intimate film,

and very naturally lit.

And so natural light, for the most part, is soft light.

I mean, you have some direct sunlight,

but everything else is ambient soft,

and we had a room that we were shooting into

that was a lot of windows.

Windows on the left, windows dead center of the frame.

We saw the ceiling, the floor, the walls, everything.

All wide lenses; where do you hide the light?

That's a challenge.

Have you found my panties?

I'd shown Robby what I was sort of developing.

And he goes, "I think we can just do the entire film."

And this is where Robby took a big risk,

'cause how do you maintain this quality of light

that you establish in that first shot?

And now you have to carry it through the entire film.

That is the challenge of every lighting person,

every cinematographer,

is how do you maintain all this over 12 hours?

Hey, man.

We were able to take single tubes

and dress them up in such a way

that it looked as if light was hitting the back of this shade

and then spilling out underneath it.

So you had this glow around the window,

and by pulling the curtain aside a little bit

and getting some hard light

to, say, splash against the window over here,

and this would then bounce off and fall onto the bed

where the characters were.

And the door!

It took us four hours to light this,

and all of it was hidden, you didn't see one lamp.

And every time Barbet would poke his head in the door,

"What's going on?"

He saw nothing going on.

Finally it was done, Barbet walks in, he goes--

Nobody likes it.

"What the hell you do different here, what?

"Just, it's been like this for four hours.

"What were we waiting for?"

And then I took him over, said,

I pulled this out, I said, "There's a lamp here.

"There's a lamp here, look it, here."

And he was in total amazement.

And I think it's, of all the films that I've ever done,

it's that one scene that I'm most proud of,

because it could only have been lit that way

with this technology that we had just developed.

Okay, one, two, three, go.

Did you see my eye?

It just opened.

Amazing still.

It's about the variations of daily details, you know.

And Robby's incredible brilliance as a person

is appreciating the details.

There's this incredible shot in the beginning

I tried to get him to sort of imitate

in our film "Mystery Train," but in the film

he made with Peter Handke,

is it "The Left-Handed Woman"?

And there's a shot of some plants in the foreground,

some grass,

and then a train goes by,

but you just see the wheels of the train

and plants go...

Then the train passes, but it's just a detail.

But Robby saw that to show the velocity of the train

and something happening by being static

on a very mundane thing,

just some weeds in the foreground or whatever;

so beautiful, though.

His entire working life is about

physically moving from one place to another,

and then moving a camera,

and a camera describing motion or travel or movement.

And I was left to wander the Earth alone.

I am nobody.

I don't care if you were married 16 times

I still love you

Yo hoy yo hoy

Hey ho ho, yeah

When we were shooting "Dead Man,"

and it was so difficult physically,

because there were locations

where we'd literally have to carry, like a safari,

carry our equipment down steep cliffs.

And Robby said something like, "Well,

"in the future they'll just do all this

and you won't even have to go there,

"but what's the point of that?

And then what will you have lived?"

And he said, "What we're doing is,

"we're going down the mountain

"to extract a big piece of marble together,

"and we're going to select it and take it out of here.

"And then later, the editing,

it's gonna be carved into the film,

"but we have to now find this piece and remove it."

You know, it was like reducing it to that.

Of course there was so much more delicacy in what he did

than just that.

William Blake is a legend now

I'm always looking forward to find

a script that goes my heart to.

When I, by reading the first pages, to say yes.

And something very seldom, of course.

And I'm hoping all the time.

Jim, I trust him so much

that I would go into the shooting

even without knowing the script.

What the hell are you doin'?

I make a window.

The way he lights a scene

is relative to the kind of mood of that scene.

The intention of the scene.

Like, he would take a lamp from near the bed

and put that one on the floor

and move another one higher, but put some scarf over it.

Or, just total Robby thing, he'd like relight the rooms.

56, joining the diamond now.

They'll split up like...

God bless the USA.

"Honeysuckle Rose," I believe,

was the first film that he did in America.

And he said,

"Yeah, I remember coming out on the set the very first day,

"and it was a sunrise shot."

And this is where he was first introduced, sort of,

to the big Hollywood production.

They drove out on location

and they started passing all these trucks,

all these big semis full of gear.

And he was like, okay, this is a sunrise shot, I mean.

Back home, he'd simply go out with a camera and an actor,

and the sun would rise and, done.

No, but this was a production.

They were up at three o'clock in the morning.

He says, "We gotta get up there early."

Well, the sun doesn't rise until...

Well, okay, whatever, we'll be here.

And he gets there, and there's a line of brute arcs,

carbon arc brutes.

All these electricians, all this cable, generators galore.

And Robby comes out, "Who asked for all this?"

Oh, you need this, this is...

You can have the sunrise, you need to fill it.

"But I didn't ask for this,

"I don't need this."

So, set up and there to do the take.

"I want the lights off," and we're filming.

And he does the shot,

and the whole electrical team's going,

"This guy's out of his mind, this guy's nuts.

"This is gonna look like crap."

It was a silhouette shot, it was just that light,

sun rising, character walks to the camera.

The net result was it was a great-looking shot.

The reason the director hired him,

because he had this unique way of seeing the world.

This was not a Hollywood eye.

And the electricians, they wanted to get him fired.

And they made it very challenging for him

on that first show.

But again, because he came from

a very practical way of doing things,

and your eye,

looking at someone coming at you in a rising sun,

they're gonna look silhouetted, not filled.

But Hollywood versus Europe.

You have to draw now, let's see.

You have to draw. - Yes, yes, yes.

Hi, will you came and have a look at this thing or?

Oh, back wherever

Oh it's a light, they will travel in

So today

Let's travel through there

Let's follow the song

And ah

The film is very much about the future

of visual culture as we envisioned it in 1990.

By now, it's no longer a film that takes place in the future,

but now it's a film that takes place in the past.

But still, we try to envision a future,

and I think you see the visionary power

that Robby had

in this film, "Till the End of the World."

I'm sorry, Claire.

Actually, the first day of shooting was Robby's birthday.

And Robby, he worked with 10 different crews

in 10 countries.

Apart from Pim, who was his focus puller,

it was so hard for Robby to each time start from scratch

and tell these people how he wanted this film to look.

Like when we arrived in Australia, we were dead.

And there they were, 40 new people

to start working with us the next day.

Yeah

- What happened? - Where is Nemo?

Ah, he!

Who's noodle, ah.

Just don't drive over Bleecker Street.

Through all this exhaustion,

Robby had managed to have his imprint on every shot.

If you see the film,

you'll realize there's an incredible consistency

in the image style,

from the first to the last shot.

Robby and I had worked so hard on this film

and had suffered so much.

And in a way our friendship

had also suffered a lot in this film

because we had shot for a whole year.

And went to four continents and to 10 countries,

and Robby was, at the end,

really completely exhausted, already in between.

But we went so much to all of our limits

that it was a burden on our friendship.

And it took us years to overcome it

and to become the friends again that we were before this movie.

Huh.

Hello, Robby Muller's machine.

This is Jim Jarmusch calling.

Hello, now it is Friday.

I think you are gone away.

I'll try you again over the weekend.

Okay, hoping to talk to you soon, okay, bye.

Robby Muller, this is David Lynch calling

from Los Angeles,

and I understand that you liked the script "Ronnie Rocket"

and that my friend Monty had sent it to you.

And I'm sorry to tell you, Robby,

that I'm going to use another cinematographer for the film.

But at the same time, I wanna tell you, you know,

that I remain a giant fan of your work,

and I'm sure we will work together one day.

I'm just calling to apologize

for them getting you all worked up about this.

And hope you're doing fine

and let's stay in touch, and one of these days work together.

Thanks Robby, bye.

Come on, it's my wedding.

I think I was spoiled by Robby

in that sense, that he didn't, you know,

put technique on top of everything.

Will you please be upstanding for the bride?

We agreed only to be like a documentary film,

that you had to film what you saw.

And it was important

that the operator was listening to the dialogue, you know.

We did not show the operator the scene before it was shot.

So he didn't know what would happen.

And we say if you get a lamp

or a mic or whatever, it doesn't matter.

Just go on

and we'll cut that out that we can't use.

Can we see the mic in the picture, please?

Thank you.

And if you want films to be

more one-to-one,

you know, not so constructed,

then you point,

and especially if you change

the way the actors are moving

in between, so the operator doesn't have a chance then.

He will always point, because then he will get

what is important in the picture.

And not grand pictures.

For him it was also important

to make the film and to create, of course, an atmosphere

in the film,

which, in both cases I thought was masterly done, so.

Cut, stop, stop, please.

This is Selma's entrance, okay?

Yeah?

He was just very adaptable, and I think he liked the idea

that we went a little more hippie.