Impulse

I’m a Jeff Bridges fan. That boy can act. His per­for­mances, espe­cially in The Big Lebowski, Tucker, and Fearless, are con­sis­tently pitch per­fect. Pouring through the bonus tracks of his DVDs, I dis­cov­ered that he not only acts, but dab­bles in pho­tog­ra­phy. Yesterday, I picked up a copy of his book, Pictures. He more than dab­bles: that boy can shoot.

If you ever visit a film set, you’ll quickly notice that actors spend most of their time sit­ting around wait­ing for the crew. When they start a new scene, the crew takes a cou­ple hours to set up. Then, they should the actors in about 15 min­utes. They usu­ally shoot a few dif­fer­ent angles in a scene, each of which requires about a half hour to set up and 15 min­utes with the actors to shoot it. In all, the actors were “on” only for about an hour and wait­ing for about 3. The best thing an actor can bring to the set is some­thing to do.
Bridges brings a cam­era. Specifically he brings a Widelux 35mm panorama cam­era — a cam­era that shoots very wide angle images that feel like a 70mm movie on the big screen. He wields it expertly, cap­tur­ing the strange behind-the-scenes world of movie mak­ing that I love: the jux­ta­po­si­tion between real­ity and staged real­ity; the the odd inten­sity that exists as dozens of peo­ple focus their atten­tion on a sin­gle indi­vid­ual; the moments of quiet; the moments of cama­raderie. It’s like the­atre, but weirder. Bridges skill­fully uses the par­tic­u­larly wide-angle of this cam­era to give the images a grand scale, but also man­ages to make very per­sonal, inti­mate por­traits as well. All the ele­ments across the wide image hang tightly together with very graphic com­po­si­tion.
Bridges also accom­plishes some­thing rarely done: he takes sat­is­fy­ing ver­ti­cal panora­mas — check out his great por­traits of Michelle Pfeiffer and Robin Williams.
Having done some pro­duc­tion still pho­tog­ra­phy myself (e.g. The Golden Leaf), I’ve got a par­tic­u­lar soft spot for excel­lent work in this field. My favorite image in the book, though, is a photo only Bridges could get — a shot from the point of view of the actor as cam­era crew mem­bers peer intently at him through hands held up to form minia­ture movie frames. Meanwhile, the rest crew looks on wait­ing for direc­tion. It’s a great image that gives me a whole new empa­thy for actors. Next time I direct some­thing, I’m going to be a whole lot nicer to my actors. Maybe even treat them as peo­ple…
This isn’t just a book of snap­shots. There are excel­lent pieces of doc­u­men­tary here, and won­der­ful por­traits (like the one of Tommy Lee Jones on p. 102). I’m thor­oughly inspired by the book (I spent all of lunchtime run­ning around with my widest angle lens, wish­ing I had another film to cover).

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