Robert Muller

Robert Muller was interviewed at the National Film Theatre by Keith Griffiths on 23 February 2002.

Over the last quarter of a century, Robert Muller has established himself as one of the most highly respected cinematographers around. Keenly sought after not only for his technical expertise but also -perhaps more importantly - for his artistic flexibility, adventurousness and creative vision, he has proved himself a crucial collaborator in helping to shape the work of auteurs like Wenders, Jarmusch and Von Trier, while continuing to put his distinctive talents at the service of lesser-known directors. Emphatically, he's no mere hack for hire but an artist in his own right, and we are thrilled to welcome him to the NFT to discuss his work and career.

• Bohemian Life
• Juggling with Words
• Why in Colour?
• Alice in the Cities

Interview © BFI 2002

Bohemian Life

Keith Griffiths: Good evening, I'm Keith Griffiths. I am here for conversation with a man of many identities, actually born Robert Muller but known very much in the public and trade as Robert Muller or Rob Muller. I once did an interview with Raoul Ruiz, who you worked with in France, and he said no one actually knew what identity he was, what nationality he was. In France they always called him that Argentinean or that Brazilian man. Many people think that you are German, but in fact of course, you are not. You are Dutch and born in the Caribbean what's more, which is very glamorous.

In your youth you did quite a lot of travelling and I just wondered whether these early youthful experiences of travelling had any significant effect on the way you began to look upon the world and that might have affected you later as a cameraman.

Robert Muller: Well it helped me a lot. I changed schools fairly often, so I had to learn straight away which people in my class would become my friends for these short periods of time. It has helped me with choosing my crew, straight from the belly. I had to struggle and not look back.

KG: You fell into film almost accidentally in a way, you went to film school in Holland, but what on earth led you to want to become a director of photography?

RM: Well I didn't have big plans at the time, I was in the Army, not professionally, but forced, and I wanted to get out. I had friends who were either painters or musicians or writers or poets and I liked the bohemian life, it attracted me. Then one day I met a guy who had just come from film school and I thought, well that might be something for me. So I wrote a letter to the Queen of Holland to ask to be released from the army and there I was in an Amsterdam film school. It was two years long, one year of basic stuff and the second year you had to choose between directing and scriptwriting or camera and editing. I chose the latter, not knowing what was coming towards me.

KG: Then you went to Munich. Did you go to the film school there, or go there to work?

RM: I went there to work because at the time it didn't have a very big industry like now, it was no place to get on the camera. A well known cameraman, Gerry Vandenberg, who was a Dutchman too, took me to Germany. He already had a good name there. The first film I did was with the assistant director of the film, he made it in Bavaria in South Germany and asked me to be his cameraman, and so it all started. It doesn't sound very glamorous but that's the way it was.

KG: Obviously Gerry Vandenberg was a great influence on you. He had a great love of photography by natural light, which is perhaps what many people identify you with, and your interest in cinematography.

RM: Yeah. The thing is, nowadays it doesn't happen that often. He let me light a lot of scenes, so that was my big school; I could see the results at the rushes. Of course he made some things I did better, but I got the basics of lighting and my own ideas. I could execute them and see the results. I went into the real shooting myself afterwards, so it was a good transition.

KG: Did it take you a long time to gain confidence and, in a sense, establish your own identity on work?

RM: I was not bothered with that at that moment in time. I just hoped I exposed everything well and I did not make any mistakes. My biggest struggle was actually the techniques. I remember the first film I was offered to be director of photography on, I was so nervous I was on the set hours before anyone else, nobody was there because it was way too early. I couldn't walk - I had to sit on a chair because my legs refused to support me. On that first terrible day, somehow there was something on the screen, on the rushes. In that film I slowly got self-confidence, and I could execute things I had in mind. Somehow I succeeded and it was very well received.

KG: Were there other cinematographer's work that you looked at as a young cameraman that influenced those early years, ones that made you say, "Wow, I want to do that"?

RM: Yeah. I didn't know how to do it, but it did give me the power to go on, because I remember seeing "8 1/2" by Fellini - and I was so struck by the way Gianni Di Venanzo lit scenes that I thought if that is possible, then I am in for it.

KG: What about other cameramen at that time ?

RM: For making atmosphere or being more "under the skin", I most admired Gianni Di Venanzo at the time. I didn't know many others. I realised that it was possible to evoke feelings with only a two-dimensional image and light, that's when I became really interested in the subject. Although I did I give myself a time limit, I promised myself that if I reached thirty six and nothing had happened, I would become a carpenter or whatever.

KG: Well we are glad you didn't. There were obviously a number of directors you worked with who were very challenging about the way you looked at the image. I am thinking of Peter Bogdanovich in Saint Jack where you found yourself in an extremely glamorous, beautiful location. It must have been tempting to say 'this is so easy,' and just turn on the camera.

RM: Well I didn't think that at the time. I had a fire in me. I was very honoured to be asked by an American director I admired. It was still very un-American what we did, he was working for Roger Corman and gave a lot of directors who are now famous the chance to work. His way of working has been my philosophy because I hate to work with big crews and big lights. I like to have it more intimate.

I remember when I finally met him in Singapore, he had a look at the camera and equipment and he said, "Is this all there is?" I said, "Yes." There were very few lights so we had to go to the limit of the stock. It became natural to me - if there is not enough light you open the lens more. The thing is, when I am on location I first look to see what the location offers me in terms of light. It was all available location, not studio work. When a director chooses a location he doesn't look at the light, he just sees the location& and then decides whether it suits the film.

I was always very careful to keep that atmosphere on set and most of it involved very little light because when you have a lot of light you are changing it incredibly, and you have to make a new location in a sense. This is not what happened later when I was working in America. There the people said, "Oh yeah this is a nice location we can make something out of it." I was more interested in finding locations that suited the characters of the film. I was like that because basically I learned from my master, Gerry Vandenburg - he was creatively lazy. I discovered that you didn't have to do much to get 'there'. And of course I didn't have the Hollywood standards, like everything in focus, but I was much freer. I told him, you can't have all that in focus. You must make a choice, we must have a rhythm in the focus, before the eye looks for it. I had a great assistant and he understood this as well.

KG: Do you enjoy the challenge of artificial light in a studio and creating that sort of mise-en-scene.

RM: Oh Yes. With a film I always start with what I have just described. It is my own way of working. Also, in the studio I use extremely little light because I discovered, when you use an enormous amount of light, you are blowing away the real atmosphere. I want to see the light "under the bed". I want to have this feeling. I like that realism and I like that play of light. I found that in Sven Nykvist. He was the same, he always said don't overdo it, keep it simple. I also found this in one of Tarkovsky's films, the one called Sacrifice, with the black dog. That impressed me a lot. I recognise in him a colleague who works the same way as I like to work.

Juggling with Words

KG: Someone told me a story that once you were in Los Angeles, I think, and you lit it extremely beautifully. The gaffer and the electricians were delighted and you said, "OK, now let's take it all apart again."

RM: Yes, because they had a system of working whereby certain things you have to light in a certain way. It was difficult to explain that I don't work like this. The gaffer was very happy and all the lights were standing and it looked kind of beautiful. Actually, what I meant really was now we are going to work on it. Now we are going to give it life. Mould it. He was shocked by this. I didn't want to work the way they were trained there, the way that they are very obedient to the studios, the way they made very polished images. It was a shock to them - well you always keep the gaffer that understands you.

[Laughter]

KG: You are not a great respecter of rules. One of my favourite films is Peter Handke's Left Handed Woman, which you photographed. It is a very intimate film. I seem to remember you once told me that if people looked at the lighting very carefully it was entirely wrong, it comes from both angles at the same time.

RM: Yes, I did that on a few occasions. It is just like juggling with words, you know. I remember having a big room. Peter is a writer, he is not a real film director. We had a very small budget, very little lamps, but I wanted to give something to the scene that was eerie and just out of place, but I didn't want the audience to detect what I was doing, just that feeling under the skin. When you analyse the light you will see it. You must know light very well to do things wrong. I remember in one interior scene I brought sunlight in from two different directions. It worked because nobody saw it consciously.

KG: There are lots of beautiful details in that film as well. There is a very intimate section on a railway station. There is a way in a lot of your photography that you concentrate on detail and there is a wonderful close up of grass.

RM: It also comes from Peter Handke of course. He sees something and writes it down in words. The special occasion was caused by the train arriving in the station, which was open, and the banks were full of grass, the shock wave of the train would flatten the grass, it was his idea. He asked me to film that. It was a very different way of working, similar to films with a writer and not with a well-known professional director. We ate in restaurants way too good to be in film production! Also his directing towards me was strange, I had to get used to it, he gave me a memo on A4 paper and it was only literature about the next day. There was no camera point of view, nothing, only what happened in the scene the next day. I would start reading and re-reading it as a book.

Then I discovered that everything he described could only be seen in that room with two different camera points of view. When I discovered that the next day, I could put the camera exactly in the right position. It is something that seldom happens now, because you always get the exact position from where you have to see something. It was a big adventure.

KG: You don't really like to talk about technique in detail. It is quite clear you are, in a sense, constantly curious about the new technologies that come through in camera equipment, and unlike many cinematographers you sort of ignore it in a way, you don't flatter 35mm as being the only source of equipment that you should use. You seem to use anything that comes to hand.

RM: Nowadays, yes. I knew it was in development but you still hang onto the official photography book and keep everything sharp and well exposed. Then, after a long while, this conventional way of shooting and conventional way of thinking bored me. I got very bored by it because filming is nice but many of the things you are doing during filming are not so interesting. There are long waits, every time the director says, "Cut", there is an uproar and chaos on the set, you lose your attention. It is like a ship, if you stop it, it is very difficult to bring it back into movement again.

I was almost getting used to it as a way of filming but also I had difficulties with it because you break the momentum. When they say cut, suddenly all the actors have dandruff on their shoulders and the make-up is gone, I never could never see anything that made filming worth stopping. As I am getting older I am getting more and more impatient. I was very glad that another director came after a while and I could finally do what I wanted to do, in the sense of leading the crew through the day and not having useless stoppages and stalls.

KG: It is said that when you go to a camera house, you ask people to take all the toys off the camera equipment. I remember the first time we walked along a beach together three years ago, you had a brand new Canon Stills Camera which you had wrapped up in rubber bands so that when you switched it on it didn't automatically do all the things that automatically happen to it.

RM: Yes, often when the camera flashes, and with big lights in films, you sometimes blow away the real things that are interesting, you get flat images when you use flash too often. Anyway, in my life as a cameraman you are confronted practically every one to two years with a new thing, a new technique, and everybody runs away with it. Everybody tries to pep up their film with these new techniques, and I kept saying it is only a tool, and if you can use the tool use it. But when you don't and it is not really necessary for the story you are telling then leave it. Maybe people expect you to use all these things but I won't, because it's a tool, just a tool.

It's like the super new lenses, basically, and it's a cliché of course, a good photographer can also do great photographs with a box camera. This is what I always longed for you know, why be put under pressure by new techniques? You lose sight of important things. Sometimes things do not have to look perfect to be perfect.

KG: Some technology, more recently, you have embraced wholeheartedly like DV work - you shot a whole feature on one. You used 100 cameras with Lars Von Trier. That must have been a real challenge and a puzzle as well?

RM: Yes. It broke the ice. He is a director in the pre-production, and during the shoot he just got rid of the obstacles that were in his way of doing what he wanted. This means he was also aware of breaking the momentum in a film. He was aware of people loosing concentration because they had to wait. When you look at a film set, for a large part of the day people are just sitting in chairs and waiting. That's a waste of a young life you know. With him, he took away the obstacles so there was no rushing in with make-up when you stopped shooting for a second. Actresses can't run to their trailer to sit there until they are called again because it takes a long time to get them back.

He said "Continuity is of no interest to me." So this was the first film I shot where I knew every morning when I got up we would shoot. Rain, hail, sunshine, whatever, we would shoot. You don't see it, but we really did it. The advantage of that is that everybody keeps their attention on what they are doing and gave their full power. Why did they give it? Because they knew that the day has an end, people would give all their concentration and their energy, they did not save it for later, they gave it there and then because they knew they we are not going on forever. It is a big advantage to keep the concentration up.

Why in Colour?

KG: This impatience that you are developing as time goes by... Were you and Lars Von Trier really conscious that you were not only going to assault the audience with Breaking the Waves, with the way that you shot the film, but also in many respects, affront many of the great cinematographers about the way a film should look. I mean many of the audience were actually physically sick in the cinema watching this film.

[Laughter]

RM: Yes I know. I must say I was not as bold as he was. I was afraid it would backfire, this moving of the camera. He wanted to get rid of this polished thing and he also wanted it in two or three shots maximum. He told me when they do it more often they start acting, then I understood why he was doing it and why he was not looking for beauty. He was even happy when something went wrong. Every time we went out of focussing he congratulated my assistant.

[Laughter]

I don't know if you noticed when you saw the film, but in one of the first scenes, where they have sex together in this toilet, the machinery that we had to pull focus from a distance broke down. The assistant couldn't say anything because he would have disturbed the scene. He shut up and had to wait until it was over. Then he said to Lars, "We fucked it up, the thing doesn't work." "Great, thank you", Lars said, "I have it and I don't want to repeat it, because then actors start acting" I am sure the repeating of that scene would not have improved it.

[Laughter]

KG: Many directors of photography of your age and at your stage of career, in a sense, give up operating. They sit in a chair and they light the scene, but operating is very much part of your way of work. Why?

RM: I was not always satisfied with the operating I saw. It was aiming more than composing. It has stiffness in it that you can still see in cinemas now. A certain technique, it is too mechanical. I am talking about maybe not the most recent films but the ones in the past. I like to move the camera. One of the things I always thought is that a lot of operators anticipate the action in advance, in kind of stupid ways. For example, someone is sitting in a chair and the camera is on standing height, looking down, at that exact moment I know the guy is getting up because he has to be up when the camera is up. If they are framing in a door you know somebody is coming in or leaving.

I want to avoid that, so I always give the actor the lead in the movement of the camera. I thought it was much more fluent and less intrusive, I wasn't the teacher, I was following it as well as the audience. I would never give away what was happening, to leave the story there as it was, as it developed. At the time I also thought I was a fairly good operator and I enjoyed it. Working with another operator is a bit like a painter making a painting and then later somebody else cuts out the frame for it. I would rather make my own frame. Every light has its movement and its framing somehow. It is not mechanical, that's why I like to have influence on it.

I also thought it was very important to be in closer contact with the actors, so they knew I was the guy behind the black box filming them. I used an exposure meter when I had to come very close to them and measure their face, almost touching it. Being so close meant they would get to know me. It worked for me. I think I created an atmosphere that did the film good.

KG: You're very well known, respected and loved for your black and white photography. Probably that's what people think of when they consider your work. What makes you make a decision with the director that a film should be shot in black and white rather than in colour? Why do you love black and white so much?

RM: It depends on the story. Some stories you automatically imagine in colour - why, I don't know. Actually, I think I know, it's because black and white won't sell. Everybody surrenders at that point. Also, people have less influence and less power to choose their own thing. When people ask me that I think, I say, "Well are you bothered by black and white photographs next to colour photographs?" Colour gives an enormous amount of superfluous information sometimes; it makes it sellable but doesn't always support the story.

Now, I sometimes ask, just as a brain exercise before, in preparation, I ask the director, why in colour? Why are we doing it in colour, why are we not doing it in black and white? So at least, even when I am forced to do it in colour, I know what I'm actually working on. I am not a zombie. Also, with black and white in Down by Law for instance, it is something like poetry, you leave out words or colours in this case, you keep it more condensed. You can tell your story without being exotic in the background to give it a nice wrapping. I think it is always good to realise why you are doing it in colour or black and white.

Down by Law is a very good example, because we had such an exotic location, if you saw this film in colour, it would not have been this film, it would have been destroyed. For instance, the bayou was in a time of the year when the water comes in, the duck weed starts floating on the surface so you have a solid, green, almost concrete-like surface, which is nice to look at as a picture. To see mangrove trees with a solid green makes people look at the landscape instead of the people. The same with Deadman. First of all it was set in 1870, when photographs at that time were in black and white, showing this landscape in full colour would be more suitable for a travel channel. It is so beautiful that people forget about the people, they tend to say they put them in that landscape because it is so beautiful and I want to avoid that.

KG: You often shoot your films chronologically or you prefer to shoot them this way if you are given the option. Why is that? Did that grow out of the Road movies with Wim Wenders, that you were on a journey in a sense?

RM: Yes. Mostly it cannot be done because it is too expensive but in Kings of the Road we did it chronologically. We literally started with the title sequence, no actors, no pressure. Then we slowly started growing and the nice thing is everybody is insecure when you start a film because, how are you going to do it? How do you set the tone for the whole film? When you use chronological you can grow. It is also good for the story because you can loose people or bring in people because you haven't shot the end yet, so you can develop the story as it develops with you.

KG: The experiences of these low budget, early movies is very different from for example, working with William Friedkin on Live and Die in LA, where you must have had everything you wanted at hand, and yet you seem to be increasingly reluctant to shoot Hollywood films. The machine is perhaps taking over?

RM: It's more the mentality, it's in a way like making cars, you make something, it sells and it's your main thing. You use a lot of money and people who give money want to see their money back. We had in Europe at least, and on the continent, at that time, a much looser thing and its maybe not that realistic nowadays, but we had much more freedom.

We could develop a film and change the script and choose our own actors and we had the final cut, all the things that Jim Jarmusch still does, but he loses, as with everything, half his budget. When you insist on having your own cast, your budget goes down. You want the final cut; you get less money because the distributors want to have total control. When you give them that control you won't recognise your own film after a while because they start cutting it, making it lighter and darker, whatever they think, mostly lighter. You still have to be happy and entertained...and what was the question?

[Laughter]

KG: I've forgotten...You've developed all these long relationships with directors, with Wim Wenders with Jim Jarmusch, Lars Von Trier. You've done a number of films with these directors, how did it work out that you keep returning to the same directors, and when a director phones you up and says I'd like you to shoot my film, how do you size them up? Is it them, or the script, or what?

RM: It's a combination, the way they talk with me and the fact that they phone me anyway.

[Laughter]

It is also the fact that you are chosen by a director, I don't have the power to just choose my directors. If Jim wants to make a film and it is the middle of the year and I have had a lot of other offers, I cancel those other offers and I wait for Jim. You wait for each other and it's a kind of trust you have, but also you are more recognised by them, it is a good feeling that you are part of the next thing they are going to shoot, maybe.....

My work is emotional, it is not, "I have got a job", but "I have got this job." I wait for it. When you have little money it takes a bit of courage, and in my case perhaps stupidity, it takes courage to wait when you not earning any money. This is not understood by a lot of production companies nowadays because you are either available or you are not and they don't wait for you. Most cameramen don't wait for the production because they have something else to lose. I lose my self-respect in things, I don't just want to have a job to be busy, but I want 'that' job. So if you have this trust from the director it is such good motivation for me to wait for him, and perhaps for way less money. You can look at yourself afterwards in the mirror because you have done something you are standing for.

Alice in the Cities

KG: How would you advise a young director to actually communicate with a cinematographer, particularly inexperienced directors. What's the most important thing to you to get from a director?

RM: Not having a second agenda, for instance. I think they should think in terms of casting a cameraman. Sometimes you are not really good for a job as a person, and he must recognise that and not just take somebody who has made a well-known film and think, "He could be good in my film as well." I think in my case it is much more personal. I get motivated by him calling me, by him having an exchange with me. Just be honest, have your own integrity.

Once, in Hollywood, I remember saying to a director, "Actually, you are responsible for how the film looks", and he fell off his chair. I said you have chosen the cameraman, what he stands for, and you chose him because of what he is, so in a way you are responsible for the guy you choose. If you choose a very polished guy you get polished images. In some systems that works, like in mainstream films you need a guy who gives a solid performance and that's it. So if they send for you, they talk to you and expect you to do the same as in the previous films, ignoring totally that you have developed too as a human being. But that is not important, like for a carmaker, it is not important how emotionally involved their workers are. It's business.

It's business and I don't feel at home. Although I know it's business I still like to make films with people who are emotionally involved and don't talk politically.

It's astonishing how few opinions the crew who make films have. It's just a job, almost like a nine-to-five job. The reason why I don't shoot there now is because I don't feel at ease. When I get a script from Hollywood I know six other cameramen get the same script and it's a race to see who phones first.

[Laughter]

KG: You have these relationships with directors, and you are very involved in the production and in the script. Obviously you are a cinematographer in a sense that has a great influence on the shape of the film; maybe even on it's content in some cases.

RM: A lot of people have their own ways of shooting, which is kind of standard. I realised early on in my career that if I had, say, a trick to give a great look, I suppose I would be out of fashion soon and I would be jobless.

KG: You don't want to do that, you want to shoot into your eighties don't you, like the other great cinematographers?

RM: I see that it is possible.

KG: This is a good moment to throw the discussion out into the audience. Have we any questions for Robert Muller?

Q: Have you ever thought about directing yourself?

RM: No. The thing is it's too "consuming". You have to really go for it and devote your life to it. I realise who I am and where I stand. I am not a director. As a director you need say five kinds of talents, to handle people, be patient etc. I don't have all these talents. I am not patient enough. I don't want to be bothered by actors after the shoot...

[Laughter]

The director has to do that, and I admire them for it. I am not able to do it because you are busy with them twenty-four hours a day or more. I've understood that directors must be like that.

Q: Did you, or the director, decide to do Down by Law in black and white?

RM: Jim decided, but when I read the script, I knew it had to be black and white. The story is too intimate to have exotic shots or baffle the people with how it looks - it would distract from the story.

In Down by Law it was great - I hadn't a clue how to photograph the film, I made test after test to keep myself busy in pre-production and I still didn't know how to go on. I finally said to Jim, "I really don't know." He said one thing which helped me through the whole film, "It's just a fairy tale," meaning I'm free to do what I want, which was great.

It happened in a film called Alice in the Cities, it started out as a colour film, coming from Europe to the United States. It looked very exotic, this little girl in New York, with its yellow cabs. People were maybe looking at the surroundings a lot and being baffled by New York and high buildings, then we would lose her. I said to Wim, "With all this exotic stuff around us we will lose her," she was barely visible in New York. He agreed and we changed to black and white. That is the only time I knew when I had an influence on proceeding with to black and white. It's very difficult to do because the whole business is set up in advance. The choice has to be at a very early stage, and then we have to discuss it with the studio. Nowadays they say shoot in colour and print in black and white, and I don't believe they will keep their promises.

[Laughter]

Q: Did Peter Handke give you a very literary shooting script rather than a formal one?

RM: It was rather vague because I had to find out myself where to put the camera. He left it to me. Afterwards I heard he liked it very much because I didn't make a big fuss about it, I just proceeded very carefully and was very conscious of the script. Perhaps there is much less pressure on you when you have storyboards, but they drive me crazy.

I have shot a film that as well as the script you had another script just as thick. I remember it was only pictures drawn by a professional storyboard artist, but he was not a real artist, so when you have two men you cannot see which one of them is sitting left or right. I thought how literally do I have to take it, because the guy who had drawn the storyboard cut off somebody's elbow, and I was really worried - should I do that? Does it mean something?

[Laughter)

Q: What do you think the director's job, for you, should be?

RM: Every director has a different character and a different way of expressing himself. It's about communication.

Q: Was Until the End of the World always conceived as cinemascope ?

RM: It's a long story, nowadays it is very difficult, when we shot Until the End of the World, we had limited light and therefore limited depth of focus. We decided to proceed on Super 35mm, but we had to have a wide screen and television markings in the camera's eyepiece. I was just aiming, not composing. Basically I talked to the director and said, "What is your ideal format?" and "Do you mind if I go for that?" You do actually make the choice with the director, and then see what happens later.

Q: Are you concerned about the loss of quality when shooting with DV, for example ?

RM: I know, there is a lower quality of photography, on the other hand I get things back, like the way of working and also the mentality of the director, who is freer. I have no fixed idea about how things should be.

There is more in it than beautiful photography and nice colours. It comes from the time when I was very much influenced by the New American Cinema, maybe before your time, like Stan Brakhage for example, they were crazy film-makers. I realised in film school what great things you could do with images, it's something you cannot prove to be good or bad, it's something that is "under the skin". You can't grab it or put it down in theory, that's why I am curious about what is left over when you strip it of everything.

When you shoot on video, everyone who does, should forget about film, it is a tool. We have film and we have a new development and don't try to bend over backwards to make it look like film.

Q: How much chance is involved?

RM: You mean happy accidents? Yes, but it's scary, especially when the film costs a lot of money, but I like happy accidents when they do happen.

Q: How excited were you about the results of shooting with 100 cameras, because it must have been difficult to anticipate.

RM: When you work with Lars Von Trier, you have pretty much a pre-designed film. I saw some tests he made before I was in Denmark. He was interested in how artificial it would look. But the amazing thing is that if you have many cameras, you can cut anywhere and you are still in continuity with the movement. A hundred was quite something else.

Q: What did you think of Lars Von Trier's camera operating on Dancer in the Dark?

RM: He has a great skill for trying new things with a camera, but still avoiding destroying the story. In Dancer in the Dark, I thought there was incredible movement with him running around with the camera. Technically I just said general things to him like, "Don't do this, because you won't be able to use it." I never gave him specific instructions, we just took risks.

It was important for Lars to do the camera work, because he could direct the actors while shooting. He knew that when he said something it could be cut out of sound. We didn't keep to the Hollywood conventions, but while we were shooting I felt that it worked. His directions during the shooting were a very important thing.

Q: Do you see the cinematographer as a co-author of a film, and if so can you explain why they get so little credit for it?

RM: More and more during my career I was astonished how much credit I got for what I did. I think that's OK. Some great photographers before my time maybe didn't get as much of the spotlight, but more and more people recognise that there's more to a film than a director. On the other hand, a cameraman can never save a film.

As for co-author, in exceptions, yes. If you are friends and go from the beginning of the idea together then it grows. But, I don't think that as a cameraman that you should approach a film with the attitude of trying to be the co-author. At the most you are the Director's "right hand".

Q: Which cinematographers do you admire?

RM: As I said before, there's Gianni Di Venanzo and Sven Nykvist and Giuseppe Lanci, although he's not so much in the foreground these days, but he made Nostalgia with Tarkovsky, which I think is exquisite. Those three have influenced me the most,

KG: Thanks very much, Robby.