An Interview with Cinematographer
Neal Fredericks

wholmmovies: I understand you just finished filming your latest feature, Callback.
Neal Fredericks: Yes, I finished it April 28th.

wm: Do you get involved with post-production at all, or is all your work as a cinematographer only?
NF: My main work is as director of photography, but on the last few films I've been more intimately involved in the post-production, pertaining to how my shots are edited within the film. If you're doing a film that has what I would call an experimental feel, or if you're taking some liberties with the narrative structure, you have to communicate with the person who's editing the film and let them know that the footage they're going to see was shot that way, because when they look at it, they may want to know: where's my master? where's my two shot? and sometimes you don't shoot those type of things. The last two films I did, I sat down with the editor and answered their questions, sort of explained to them how we shot the scene.

wm: What was your last film, wasn't it Stonecutter?
NF: No, the one before this was called Voodoo Mardi Gras, which was a horror film. I shot that in December. (2001) It'll be out in September. They just sold it to a distributor and it'll go straight to video.

wm:: I would imagine that everyone wants to talk to you about The Blair Witch Project, right?
NF: Sure. I have no problem with that.

wm: Are you sick of talking about it?
NF: Not at all. I still get interviewed about it. It's on my reel, it's on my resume'. It's a curiosity factor for some people.

wm: Tell me about Dreamers.
NF: Dreamers is a film I shot of couple of years ago. It had a limited theatrical (release) in the summer of 2000 and it should be coming out on video this year. The director's Chinese, and this was her first film.

wm: What is her name?
NF: The director's name is Ann Lu.

wm: I heard somewhere that she's your wife?
NF: Exactly, she is my wife. I met her on a film shoot in Atlanta back in '94. She was going to film school in Tennessee. We struck up a relationship and we both moved back to Los Angeles and raised the financing to make her feature film. I was intimately involved in Dreamers. It should be out on video before the end of the year.

wm: When did you get married?
NF: We did the film in '98 and then got married in '99. She's got her next film being developed right now, so hopefully we'll shoot her second film by the end of this year.

wm: What are the advantages and disadvantages of being married to someone else who is in the film industry?
NF: When I first got out of film school I believed I shouldn't be with someone who was in the industry. But when I met Ann, and we realized how much we had in common, with the films we liked and how we wanted to direct our careers, it actually worked out to be the best thing. It's a very unpredictable business.

wm: It seems like it might be stressful for both of you to be working in the film industry.
NF: It is, but we both understand that and it allows us to (extend ourselves). She gets to see and watch the directors that I work with, as a cinematographer. She gets to see what other people are doing, with relative ease, and she can apply that to what she's trying to do, or learn what she needs to avoid. It gives her a better inside look to help her with her directing and writing.

wm: You both get shared experiences and contacts.
NF: Right. I guess one of the disadvantages would be that you get what I call "film overload". Sometimes that's all we're engulfed in. That can be stressful. When The Blair Witch Project got released, a lot of independent filmmakers that I knew - including my wife - had what I would almost call "semi-nervous breakdowns" from that film. Because most of them see their own films as being among the best, better than the other films.

wm: They probably almost have to, just to survive, right?
NF: Right, but there are some film directors who can look at somebody else's film and say "Hey, that's a great film!" and enjoy it and just take it for what it is. My wife does that. But some other film directors, you know, they can't handle it.

wm: You mean the success of other projects, other than their own?
NF: Exactly. That's the industry as a whole. When you talk to people in the film industry, almost everybody badmouths everybody else. That's part of the mechanism of the system that chews up people and spits them out and they don't continue in the industry.

wm: Do you think that's because of the extreme competitive nature of the industry? Where there are so many people who want to work and be successful, but so few who actually reach a level of success, become well-known and earn a significant income?
NF: I think so, and that applies to almost every creative industry, like music. Any industry where you have to get to the upper echelon to really make a living at it. There can be too much negativity, and it wears you out a little bit. Some people get upset at other peoples success. But some directors I work with, all they care about is their work and they don't let outside forces interfere, or worry about what other people are doing. I'm the kind of person who believes in karma, what goes around, comes around. The filmmakers that I've worked with that have treated me well, they continue to make films because of the kind of people they are. The ones that treat people badly, or lie, or don't live up to their promises, those are the ones that it comes back and gets them.
filming a scene from Callback

(c) 2002 Illya Friedman/G-Man Productions
wm: Is what I hear you saying that it isn't the nice guys who finish last in the film industry? That most of the people who have success are not the jerks?
NF: I think so. If you have talent, that stands out the most. But if you're a jerk, usually people get tired of that and don't care how talented you are, because you're hard to work with. Some directors get away with that their whole lives, though, and some just can't. L.A. is a tiny town, as far as the film industry goes, once your reputation gets out, what type of person you are, it either helps you or hurts you. I'll work on a movie where I think I don't know anybody on it, but during the course of shooting you run into several people, "Oh my God, I can't believe it's been so long". I run into the same people at screenings, events like that, so it's a real small town.
Neal Fredericks filming Richard Eden, starring in Callback

(c) 2002 Chris Glatis/G-Man Productions
wm: For where you'd at and what you're doing, where are you at in terms of your personal goals?
NF: I'm definitely on my way. I don't think I'll ever get to where I really want to be, as a cinematographer, but that's not a bad thing, as long as I can maintain a steady course and continue to do films that I like and I'm able to make a living at. I'm happy with that. I have goals about where I want to go, and who I want to work with, things like that. My main goal is to shoot films that get released. Bottom line, I want to shoot films that get seen.

wm: Blair Witch Project is the film you've been involved with that had the biggest audience.
NF: That's right, it was the second or third feature I've shot that actually got a theatrical (release). It was the biggest theatrical I've ever gotten, probably the biggest I'll ever get. I'm pretty realistic about that, some people will delude themselves about things. It grossed about $140 million in the U.S.

wm: That's big.
NF: That's big, but it's a good thing and a bad thing. Because of the nature of the way the film is, stylistically, it was a story choice to have the film look that way. When a film gets that big, you want it to sort of propel you, help you get to another level, and that film never really took me to the next level, where I thought it should have.

wm: That's probably unfair, because of course, the knock on it was that it looked like an amateur shoot, but it looked that way by design.
NF: Exactly, that's it in a nutshell right there. When people looked at that film, industry people in particular, that film has a really bad reputation in Los Angeles, because of the way it looked and because of the way it was sold to the public, by saying things like "the actors shot the movie" and "there was no script", neither of which is true, but they wanted to make it seem like the film was "for real".

wm: Those were basically marketing ploys, and they worked because they got that hype and they built the hype around those kinds of lead-ins.
NF: Exactly, and that can apply to almost any film actually. They try to get people into the theater.

wm: Surely though, knowledgable people in the industry had to know that the look of the film was by design.
NF: You'd be surprised. The actors that were in that movie have had an incredibly hard time getting work. Because industry people think that they were just being themselves in that movie, that they weren't acting. Industry people are saying things like "Well, you did great in that film, but that's all you can do." People pigeonholed other people immediately in this town. The year after Blair Witch was released, I was called "the guy who only shot video" and I had been shooting film for ten years before that.

wm: How much of that do you attribute to negativity, because anybody would love to be involved in a film that grossed $140 million? Was it because industry people were thinking "I could have done that"?
NF: I think there's a lot of that, that people think they could do it. But the reality of it is that myself and the other people who made that movie had already made feature films before that, that have never seen the light of day. So it was sort of deconstructing the craft of filmmaking to try to make something unique. If you try too hard, then it doesn't work. You have to have a game plan and then when you make a film, there's an unforeseen force that's either going to make the film work, or it's not, and it's not 100 percent, there's no guarantee. Especially with that film, where the original design of the film was never seen by the public, there was so much footage in that movie that no one's ever seen. I shot 35mm on that movie that no one's ever seen. There was a Phase 2 of that movie that no one's ever seen.

End of Part I

to be continued...!

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