In signing onto an independent film, with its token limited budget tagged along, cinematographer Jacob Pinger placated himself with the fact that shooting the romantic-comedy I’m Through With White Girls, or The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks was only “slightly unrealistic as opposed to extremely unrealistic,” he says laughingly.

“We knew we would have to do things with less coverage,” he adds. “One of the lunch scenes, where (the characters are) in an Indian restaurant, we had six speaking roles for three pages. When (Producer Lia Johnson and I) were mathematically figuring out how much coverage that would be, and consequently how much film that would be, we realized that a scene like that would be a huge portion of our film budget.”

Despite the hurdles, Pinger happily worked for deferred pay, applying his eye to telling the most honest and cohesive story possible. “There’s nothing that compares to the creative process of making fiction. There’s something about that which is just so fun,” he says. Beyond expressing his passion for filmmaking, transferred throughout the phone conversation in easy laughter, Pinger here talks about working as a one stock wonder, the visual imagery of Guatemala and the importance of blocking.

SM: As a cinematographer, were you working with a particular set of influences?

JP: Initially the approach was a practical one in terms of, “We have to figure out a way where we can shoot this with less coverage and justify doing things in single shots.” So, there are a lot of shots in the film where there’s a two-shot that lasts about a page or so. So, we started looking around for examples of that…I loved ( The Squid and the Whale) so much. I thought it was really funny, so for me that became a specific influence. They still had a lot more money than we did, but a lot of the same ideas were there.

The concern I had was that I knew we could pull off a totally slick-looking Hollywood romantic-comedy for a few scenes, but I knew that there would be times when we’d be at our eleventh hour and still have three pages of dialogue to shoot in a given day. That was inevitable. My concern was, if we set up a look at the beginning of our shooting schedule that was impossible to maintain through the whole schedule, we would have a movie that looked really uneven.

I’m about 37, and I think that if I were about 27 shooting the same movie, I might have been more selfish as a DP. I think DPs can be selfish on low-budget movies sometimes. They’ll say, “I’m going to get the best footage for my reel out of it, and if the whole movie stinks, it’s not my problem.” So, they might set it up where they’ll get five scenes that look like a Steve Martin comedy, but then the rest of the movie will just fall apart because they’ll have taken too many of the resources from such a small budget to get the great look for the scenes that they want for the reel.

So, what we decided was: We need to establish a look that we know we can be consistent with throughout the whole movie. If we establish it from the very first scene, we can get away with making some of the scenes look significantly cooler when it’s justified.

In my own mind I thought, Jay Brooks is not a typical character, and we should make a movie that Jay Brooks would want to see. That became my own philosophical justification for doing it handheld and against convention.

SM: Now, talking about the sheer technical aspects, what stocks did you end up working with, and how much film did you end up shooting?

JP: For budget reasons, I didn’t want to be in a position where we were mixing film stocks in a single scene. So, we just ended up using one film stock for the entire thing to simplify Lia's efforts to get film stock. I know she got a lot of film stock donated. To have it be one film stock made that a lot easier.

We shot a (Kodak) 7218, a 500 ASA film stock, and even though it’s a faster film stock, the grain now is so good that we never felt it would be an annoying amount of grain. Ten or fifteen years ago, that fast a film stock in 16mm would have had a lot more grain to it, but in the last few years, with the advent of digital, Kodak’s really been doing a lot to improve their film stocks as a way of maintaining a competitive edge against digital formats; the stocks are just getting better and better. That worked for us because we could just use one stock, simplify the process for everybody, and it still looks good throughout the whole thing. So even though not a lot of people would shoot day-exteriors on such a fast film stock, I knew it would work…Also, it’s supposed to be a gritty approach anyway. Even if there was a little more grain than normal, it didn’t really make a difference. Actually, people have been pushing this film stock to get grain out of it just because it’s so clean compared to the previous 500 ASA stocks.

SM: I would never have thought this was shot on one stock just because of the color switches. The night scenes are all cool, and the pivotal scene with the manic handheld where Jay’s trying to get back into the house, and Catherine catches him, it’s definitely cool there. But, I feel as if for some reason the middle of the film, particularly when he’s just beginning to know Catherine, all felt very warm. How did you play with that?

JP: We didn’t use any filters on the camera, but we had some control over a couple of the locations. The apartment that (Jay) lives in we ended up painting gray in order to give it a colder feel. Then the place where Catherine lives, we didn’t have control over painting it persay, but we were able to find and chose a house that was very colorful and warm.  Actually because the houses are so close together in the same neighborhood, they’re actually the exact same layout—which we were always a little concerned about. They’re literally the same house. They’re about three blocks from each other, built by the same contractor, the same year, probably in the 1930s or 40s. So, once we had Catherine’s house—which belongs to some friends of Lia’s who’ve just painted away and made their house really colorful—we intentionally made Jay’s house less appealing. We just did our best not to let red, orange and yellow colors in the shot unless Jay was either with Catherine or with family. We felt that when he was in the presence of family, or in the presence of Catherine—the joke was, “Catherine brings color to his life.” So, initially it was done just through trying to keep some control over what colors were in the shot.

It was a little disconcerting in terms of how color timing goes because I wasn’t sure ultimately how the film was going to be finished, and what I mean by finished is the final timing. That film stock is also a lower contrast film stock. It’s good for situations where you don’t have as much control over the lighting as you’d want, or in our situation, the film went from negative directly to high-definition master tape. They did what’s called a one-light, low-contrast transfer to the high-definition tape. They tried to get the entire range of information—as much as possible—off the negative and onto a tape to give us the most control over it later. So, a lot of the inherent qualities in term of color rendition that the film stock might have ultimately get washed away because it goes through three different video stages.  The main thing that we used the stock for was the lower contrast nature of it so that when it went to video we would still have the ability to have information in the shadows and the highlights. Even though we shot film, which gives it the look that it has, nevertheless we had to be aware that it would exist primarily on video for most of its adult life.

SM: What do you feel you learned throughout this production?

JP: As I develop as a cinematographer, I tend to learn the same lesson in increments over time, which is be braver, more bold, take more chances…Don’t be afraid. If you think, “Oh, there’s not enough light,” usually there still is. Because there’s still a mystical quality to shooting film, people, including myself, in a moment of doubt, take the safe choice. The best cinematographers among us are the ones who push the envelope and are brave.

SM: Now, how did you get into cinematography? How did you know this is what you wanted to do with your life?

JP: I thought I was going to be a journalist. After my first year of college, I went to Central America, Nicaragua for basically the entire year, and I wrote this extensive article about the elections in Nicaragua in 1989. Everything I wrote turned out to be untrue, and I realized that basically I could never be objective, so I was probably not fit to be a journalist. I would always be way too subjective.

On the same trip, at a certain point, I was traveling through Guatemala, and I was on a bus in the mountains in Guatemala. I was struck by the visual experience of that trip, and there are some moments where I can still remember it. I’d never been a photographer, but I still remember there were these moments on the bus where we were on a dirt road, maybe there were one or two other Europeans on the bus with me. There was sunset light coming through the bus; there was dust everywhere; there were chickens, kids and everybody had these incredible, colorful jackets on with traditional Guatemalan embroidery. I was just struck by the visual moments of that and came back thinking, “Okay, I want to do films now.  I’ve seen these images, and there’s nothing in journalism that could ever capture those kind of moments.”

I had no idea how hard the business is, but I’m still at it. 

SM: Why did you jump boat to narrative as opposed to documentary or photojournalism?

JP: Around the time that I had footage on a reel that was good enough to get hired as a cameraman was right about the same time that reality TV started to take off. Nobody believes me yet, but I think reality TV is our generation’s Corman. It’s fulfilling that niche that Corman used to fill, or before Corman, it was the newsreel photographers. Then in the 1980s there were music videos. So reality TV is our generation’s Corman in the sense that for better or worse it’s creating a whole generation of filmmakers.

There is a lot that I got and continue to get shooting reality TV that I was able to apply to the film…There’s a certain mythologizing of cinematography in a certain way where cinematographers are these magicians or masters of light. A certain element of that is true, but it is overblown. One of the experiences you get working in reality TV is that it demystifies the process. I certainly wouldn’t argue that reality TV quality-wise could ever measure up to good cinematography. It can’t, but at the same time to get over the fear of framing a shot, exposing a shot and continually analyzing the results, reality TV is creating—there are thousands of camera guys out there because of this whole new industry. In a sense, to answer your question, I did end up getting into a form of photojournalism. Plus, there’s a certain amount of overlap, so I’ve done a number of documentaries in the last couple years too.

There’s nothing as a cinematographer that compares to lighting somebody, creating a scene and taking pieces of moments in time and having them stitched together to create a seamless scene. There’s something indescribable about that, about creating a new reality. It’s sort of a drug; it’s sort of addicting, and that’s basically why there are so many of us who are into it. There’s just something about that creative process which is just so fulfilling. 

SM: A few questions to wrap up: What is one question about cinematography that you’ve always wanted to be asked but never have been?

JP: In all the cinematography stuff I read, I’ve seen almost nothing about the absolute importance of blocking. Even if you have a director who has no interest in the visual look of the film, which is rare but it does happen, the intersection of what the DP does and the director does always comes down to blocking. So, if I could ever influence somebody on how to create a cinematography class, there’d be a whole class on blocking. It’s so important, and it’s one of those things that DPs don’t concentrate enough on and don’t understand enough, especially new DPs…I hate when I see new DPs limit blocking because they’ll say, “Oh, I can’t light that, or we can’t shoot that.” That’s really annoying to me because it really hamstrings the actors and director. I have my ego, and I’m sure that I’ve gotten in my share of arguments with directors, but I try as much as possible to let the director and actors do the blocking they feel they need to do and then accommodate what I do from there. It makes all the difference in the world.

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