STEPHEN GOLDBLATT   ASC/BSC

Born: 29 April 1945, Johannesburg, South Africa. Went to the UK at age 7.

Education: Film School of the Royal College of Art [RCA], London [graduated in 1969].

Career: Started as photojournalist for the London Sunday Times at the age of 18. After his study he worked on doc's and commercials. Made his USA debut as doph with 'The Cotton Club'.

Appeared in the doc 'Cinematographer Style' [2005, Jon Fauer; ph: J. Fauer, Jeff Laszlo, Brian Heller & David Morgan].

Awards: 'Oscar' AA nom [1992] and ASC Award nom [1992] for 'The Prince of Tides'; 'Oscar' AA nom [1996] and ASC Award nom [1996] for 'Batman Forever'; 'Emmy' Award nom [2001] for 'Conspiracy'; 'Emmy' Award nom [2002] for 'Path to War'; ASC TV Award nom [2003] & 'Emmy' Award nom [2004; part 2 'Perestroika'] for 'Angels in America'; Plus Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award [2007]; Hollywood FF 'Cinematographer of the Year' [2007].

Website: Stephen Goldblatt

'Angels in America': 'From a technical point of view, the project was challenging in almost all respects - it required more than 400 digital effects supervised by Richard Edlund; a sophisticated digital dailies approach spearheaded by DP Stephen Goldblatt; and a crucial digital intermediate performed at EFilm, Hollywood. Yet, the often mundane and under-appreciated art of wire removal may well have been the most important technical achievement of the entire massive project. That's because filmmakers were required to turn [Emma] Thompson into a flying angel on-set in a particular way that was both visually believable on the one hand and painterly/mystical on the other. For two crucial sequences, Thompson wore a huge rig featuring gigantic angel wings as she sat on a suspended bicycle seat hanging from the ceiling grid of a sound stage at New York's Astoria Studios. Barraged with smoke and wind and cleverly backlit, she recited Shakespearian-like dialogue into the maelstrom. Then, Richard Edlund's effects' team faced the unenviable task of removing every trace of the rig - a particularly complicated request considering both the size and amount of the wires and the amount of smoke swirling around Thompson. "It was yeoman's work, honestly, to perform that amount of wire removal," Edlund says of the effects' team he supervised. "This is the most difficult wire-removal project I have ever been associated with. They shot those scenes so that we had to not only remove the wires, but also to animate smoke back in and make it mix seamlessly with real smoke. There were also times when the wind machines blew [Thompson's] costume into a wire, or where you would see the bulge of the bicycle seat - all that had to be repaired."

Given the size and scope of the production, Goldblatt demanded and received from Mike Nichols what he calls "unprecedented" involvement in all aspects of the project, from the earliest read-throughs during pre-production in December 2001 through completion of the digital intermediate earlier this year. Serving as the fulcrum of his two-year effort was Goldblatt's insistence on personally creating and maintaining what he calls "a visual database" of the entire project. To build this database, Goldblatt personally took digital photos of "every significant setup, every day" throughout pre-production and 150 days of shooting. The DP shot those pictures on set, personally loaded and indexed them into his Apple computer, and used Photoshop to color-correct them, tweak contrast, saturation, density, and so on, to his satisfaction. Each night, he emailed key images to the project's dailies colorist, who was responsible for creating DVD and DigiBeta dailies for Nichols, HBO executives, and the rest of the filmmaking team. Colorist Steve Scott at EFilm also referenced those pictures during the digital intermediate phase, as did Richard Edlund's effects' team throughout the post cycle. "This was more elaborate than any reference material I had ever kept [on past projects]," says Goldblatt. "But it was necessary. There was no way to shoot this project in continuity, especially with the big stars like Al Pacino and Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. We had to shoot their scenes when they were available. Therefore, we were always going backward and forward in time each week, often shooting portions of sequences that were started months earlier. We needed some clear reference of what our lighting and colors were when we shot those parts earlier. So I kept this visual record, which helped with dailies, helped with shooting sequences out of order, helped with shooting effects plates, and helped with the digital intermediate. Since we had budget constraints, film dailies were not really practical. But creating DVDs with this kind of color reference for the color-timer was the next best thing. They gave Mike Nichols random access to jump from scene-to-scene as he pleased, and they kept everything consistent. It was a big job creating these images and keeping track of them, but well worth it." Goldblatt's obsession with image consistency and quality control was so total that he even went to Mike Nichols' home in New York during the shoot to calibrate Nichols' computer monitor to match his own.' [From article by Michael Goldman on the 'millimeter' website, 2003.]