Last month, the American Society of Cinematographers announced that feature and commercial DP Allen Daviau, ASC, will receive the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award at the 21st annual ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards on Feb. 18, 2007. Russ Alsobrook, ASC, who chairs the awards committee said, “Allen is still in the prime of his career, but he has already created an innovative body of work that will stand the test of time.” Daviau has earned five Oscar nominations, for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, Avalon, Empire of the Sun and Bugsy. The latter two films took top honors at the ASC Awards, and Empire of the Sun won the British Film Academy’s cinematography award.
Daviau began his career shooting 16mm shorts, one of which landed him a job on a new music program on an L.A. TV station. The program was cancelled after 13 weeks, but its producer then moved into creating pre-MTV music videos for record companies that distributed them to stations. Daviau shot The Animals, Jimi Hendrix and others. Later, he got the opportunity to shoot Amblin for Steven Spielberg in ’68. That short caught the attention of Universal, who brought Spielberg aboard initially directing telefilms.
Daviau spent the next 10 years pursuing his dream. He was a lighting effects technician designer, shot 16mm industrial films and 35mm commercials. He got the chance to join the camera guild in ’78. That enabled him to work on larger budget films, beginning with a TV movie. When he found out that Daviau was in the union, Spielberg had him shoot a sequence for the new edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. E.T. became Daviau’s first full-length feature. He has subsequently compiled some 25 additional narrative credits, including Fearless and Van Helsing. He also stayed an active commercial DP, having compiled 1,000-plus spot credits.
SHOOT:
What does being named to receive the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award mean to you?DAVIAU: It’s an incredible honor, to be a member of the ASC is a fantastic honor…to be honored by my fellow ASC members is as high an honor as you can ask for.
SHOOT:
You have been quoted as saying that commercials “are in many ways the best friend of the cinematographer.” What do you mean by that?DAVIAU: In addition to what you learn practicing this craft and how it translates to other film projects, you have the opportunity to earn money while you wait for a motion picture and be more careful about deciding what to shoot. With preproduction and postproduction, you are investing two years of your life [into a feature]. You want to do films that you really like. Commercials give you that freedom to choose.
SHOOT:
How would you describe the current state of commercial production?DAVIAU: Sad…The only thing that hasn’t changed is car commercials. They don’t want to take those out of the country. We had an actors strike about six years ago and it caused the vast majority of commercials to go to other countries. It was that kind of thing that was the first alteration. And the face of television has changed. People find it very difficult to understand how to buy commercial time. Live sports are the only thing we can say the audience is watching, because they are not using their Tivo most of the time while they watching sports. The vast majority of other programming we have to question.
I hope there is a comeback in commercial production. Not only for seasoned cinematographers, but they are very useful for people starting out in their career, to learn to make images that are eloquent.
Commercials are a marvelous medium and I’ve always enjoyed them. When you are doing a commercial, you have to develop a complex message in a very short period of time. What I have learned in commercials by working in a :30 or :60 format is you really learn to appreciate images that are concise and say what they have to say quickly.
SHOOT:
Is there a message that you would like to get to the ad agencies?DAVIAU: I’m going to continue to say HD is becoming more and more of a reality as more receivers are winding up in homes. There are incredible [demographics] that you are acquiring with HD…and it doesn’t cost that much more to do. It gives you an added impact on that audience. It’s well worth the investment and more and more it’s becoming an everyday reality.
I don’t think people realize that [most] network programming…is shown in HD. The impact on the programming is big and advertising should be taking advantage of it.
SHOOT:
What is your assessment of technology’s impact on filmmaking today?DAVIAU: I think the vast majority like the look of 35mm and the flexibility that you have in working with it. You still have a lot more flexibility working with a 35mm negative than with a digitally oriented image. That will change. At the moment film still has the upper hand…if we seem cautious, it’s because we are dealing with our investor’s money.
We have to think of archival longevity. There’s a lot we don’t know about hard drives. We don’t know how long those masters will keep. They may survive just fine…but I have this terrible feeling that with the speed with which digital is changing…we have to keep track of what we have and how we are storing them and when we need to copy them to a different format. [Archiving] is a work in progress.
We are in an interesting period. There is this fantastic coexistence between film and digital…We are going to be shooting for film a long time–that’s not to say we are not going to be shooting digital. You can make powerful images with digital cameras.
SHOOT:
The ASC and the seven-studio consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) created Standard Evaluation Material (known as StEM), test film designed for evaluating the performance of digital projectors and other elements of digital cinema systems, in order to maintain the integrity of the art form. You served as director of photography on the film, which featured an Italian wedding and was lensed on the Universal Studios backlot. Describe the purpose of this project and how it is helping to advance the industry.DAVIAU: It was a collaborative process with the ASC. There were directors of photography everywhere. It was very good in that everyone was looking for things that would be meaningful tests [i.e., fire, confetti, rain, different times of day]. It was essential that the tests worked for everything. We had a number of people making sure that it did. I’ve had the opportunity to see it on large screens and small screens. It calls attention to how well the reproduction of the image is achieved….It was a joy to work on it. You know how much impact it has had and will continue to have.
