In the 10-plus years he’s spent shooting spots and documentaries, DP Peter Donahue has developed what he sees as his most important professional quality: adaptability.
"The things you plan aren’t necessarily going to happen, so you have to be able to react and solve the problem—to find something there that maybe you didn’t know was there—rather than trying to force everything into a corner," explains Donahue, who is represented for commercial and feature work by The Skouras Agency, Santa Monica. "It’s a good skill to have."
That skill was put to the test this past winter, when Donahue was shooting Nike’s "Pull Up" for director Rupert Sanders of Omaha Pictures, Santa Monica, via Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore. Filmed on location in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N.Y., the spot depicts two men engaged in an outdoor pull-up competition in front of a cheering crowd. The pipe the men use to do their pull ups appears to be suspended from an elevated train platform. Early in the shoot, Donahue and Sanders had, as the DP puts it, "a bit of bad luck" with the suspension apparatus.
"The rig that was supporting [the pull-up bar] broke," Donahue recalls. "There wasn’t much we could do about it, so we just had to approach things differently. Instead of spending a lot of time on the actual pull-up contest, we decided to make [the ad] about the texture of the neighborhood and the people who were watching."
Since the goal was to make viewers feel like members of the crowd, Donahue kept his camerawork as natural as possible. "Our concept was, no shot would be anything other than a POV—something that someone could actually see with their own eyes," he shares. "We didn’t manufacture shots that looked contrived or commercial, where you would see these weird focus pulls or angles."
Overhead shots, he says, were designed to look "like they could come from someone looking out of a window. We didn’t want anything that looked like it was coming from a crane. [The focal lengths of the lenses] were all in the normal range. We got a little wider than 40 and a little bit longer than 135 occasionally, but there was nothing extraordinarily wide or very tight, since we wanted to keep them all as POVs."
Though he was only able to shoot a few takes of the pull-up contest before the rig broke, the spot has the feel of a grueling, extended battle. When the more menacing looking contestant finally concedes, the relief of the Nike-clad victor is palpable. "We were really pleased with the way [‘Pull Up’] turned out," says Donahue, who adds that he especially enjoyed collaborating with Sanders. "I think we approached it with the same attitude, and even though we had technical troubles, it came out great."
Real Life
Donahue’s ability to think fast on his feet has served him well over the years—particularly on the many projects he’s lensed for director Errol Morris (represented for spotwork by bicoastal/international @radical. media). "Errol doesn’t like to be boxed into a corner," states the DP, who once shot 24 Citibank :30 spots in two days with Morris for Fallon Minneapolis. "He’s not going to put in a lot of prep time or tell everybody what we’re going to shoot, or how it’s going to be," relates Donahue. "So you have to go to the shoot with none of the questions answered, and work for things more instinctually. You can either resent that and fight it, or you can just go with it.
"For me, it’s a great way to shoot something, and a great way to approach a situation," he continues. "It’s helped me as a cinematographer to be able to light quickly, and to understand how to use the light that a location gives you. Film can be a monster. There are so many people and so much equipment. You can make it so big that it becomes restricting. Working with Errol, I’ve learned how to strip away all that stuff, to be able to find things, and to make something of nothing."
Indeed Donahue, who has worked on dozens of ad campaigns with the spontaneous Morris, says that the director "doesn’t approach commercials in the way that other directors do."
Donahue met the noted documentarian five years ago, when he was hired to shoot Morris’ initial commercial project out of @radical.media: the first round of Miller Brewing Co.’s "High Life" campaign via W+K. "We had a great time working on that, and at the time he was just about to make his film, Mr. Death," Donahue remembers, referring to the documentary of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., an execution device inventor and Holocaust denier. "He asked me to shoot Mr. Death, and I’ve been working with him ever since."
The DP’s most recent longform collaboration with Morris is The Fog of War: 13 Lessons of Robert S. McNamara. A documentary featuring the former U.S. secretary of defense’s views on combat in the 20th century, The Fog of War has been accepted as an official entry in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. "I didn’t shoot the interviews [with McNamara]; the interviews were shot as part of a TV series that [Morris] was doing," notes Donahue. "But once he realized it was more of a movie than a TV show, I came on and shot the visuals with him, and then shot some unstaged footage of McNamara in and around Washington. [McNamara] was an interesting guy to be around, and I think it’s a very timely and important film."
Documentaries and spots are "the complete opposite," Donahue relates. "They’re both great in their own way. With spots, you’re given a lot of time, you’re given a lot of money, a lot of equipment and all the manpower you need. It’s a great learning experience in terms of how to be a cinematographer, since all the possible tools are available to you. And then when you shoot a documentary, you have to work with almost no equipment. The combination of the two extremes has given me great experience. I’m able to deal with almost any situation I come across."
A graduate of Boston’s Art Institute, Donahue initially planned to become a still photographer. "I moved to New York and started assisting photographers, but I really wasn’t crazy about the business," he recalls. "I was lucky because at the time there were a lot of independent films being made."
Donahue found work as a gaffer on non-union films, and eventually worked his way up. In addition to Morris and Sanders (for whom he attached "between sixty and eighty cameras" to an all-terrain vehicle to get as many angles as possible for the video game-inspired, W+K-created Nike ad "The Great Return"), Donahue has lensed spots for many other directors—including Stacy Wall of bicoastal Epoch Films; Spike Lee of 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Brooklyn; and Albert Watson of cYclops, New York.
While he respects what directors do, Donahue says he has "no interest at all" in directing himself. "As a director, you have to be constantly talking about what you’re doing to others around you. That just doesn’t suit my personality," explains the cinematographer, who is currently at work on a Morris-helmed Infone spot via W+K. "I’m not a schmoozer at all. I don’t want to go out to dinner. I feel like I’m really lucky—when they say wrap on the last day, I can go home."
