Whenever an older, revered icon of the film industry dies, there are plenty of testimonials and remembrances written about that person. But it’s sad that we only take the time to fully appreciate these people’s brilliance after their passing. Hence, The Greats, a new biweekly column that celebrates cinema’s living legends.
When we discuss Hollywood’s so-called renaissance of the 1970s, we tend to think of certain directors: Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby. But if there is one cinematographer most closely associated with that decade’s intelligent, individualistic mainstream films, it’s Gordon Willis. His name in the credits practically guaranteed that you were about to see something worthwhile, and his pictures ran the gamut from grand dramas (The Godfather) to sharp comedies (Annie Hall) to superb thrillers (All the President’s Men) to evocative musicals (1981’s Pennies From Heaven). Other cinematographers would try to figure out exactly how he managed to craft such deep, rich visual styles for so many different types of movies. But Willis was never much help in elucidating his process. “You’re looking for a formula; there is none,” he once said. “The formula is me.”
Willis recently turned 82, and he hasn’t shot a film for over 15 years, due in part to failing vision—a cruel malady for someone with such an eye. He’s been around movies from an early age, his father working in makeup during the Depression. Growing up in Queens, Willis thought he might become an actor or a fashion photographer—his parents were dancers for a time—but he joined the Air Force during the Korean War, working on instructional films. Returning to the U.S., he served as a cameraman on commercials and documentaries, finally becoming a director of photography in the late ’60s.
His first triumph occurred only a few years later. The Godfather is adored for many reasons, but its painterly period look is integral to its greatness, suggesting both nostalgia and dread, sepia mixing with shadows that cover the characters’ eyes—and their intentions. Willis struggled to come up with a visual strategy for the film during preproduction, but then an idea hit him. “I finally decided, ‘This should be this kind of brassy yellow look to it,’” he recalled in 2002. “Don’t ask me why—it just felt right, you know? … And the other part of the thinking was, ‘It should have this kind of New York street look—one foot in the gutter, ’40s kind of feeling, a little dirty.” The Godfather is about loyalty and ambition, and the movie’s depiction of the mobster mythos as an insidious twist on the American Dream can be felt in every conflicted frame: It’s a warm family drama that feels sinister.
Willis’s fellow cinematographer Conrad Hall once dubbed him “the prince of darkness,” a great nickname but not entirely accurate. True, his moody lighting in thrillers like The Parallax View and Klute adds palpable tension to those movies, but it’s really the juxtaposition of light and dark—say, between the sun-splashed wedding of Vito Corleone’s (Marlon Brando) daughter and the dimly lit meetings with his lieutenants—that give his movies their dramatic power. One of the overriding themes of Hollywood’s ’70s films is the impact of Vietnam and Watergate on the culture, and you can sense in Willis’s movies that innocence is giving way to a grim new reality. If there’s darkness in The Godfather or All the President’s Men—which chronicled journalists Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein’s (Dustin Hoffman) investigation into the Watergate break-in—it’s merely reflecting a newfound societal mistrust of once-sacred institutions and ideals.