Gordon Willis¶

At a glance¶

Born: May 28, 1931, Astoria, Queens, New York
Died: May 18, 2014, North Falmouth, Massachusetts, aged 82 — cancer
Nickname: The Prince of Darkness — coined by Conrad Hall
Active: 1966–1997
Godfather role: Cinematographer, all three films
Academy Awards: 1 Honorary (2009). Zero competitive wins. Two nominations, both late.

I'm a minimalist. I see things in simple ways… It's human nature to define complexity as better. Well, it's not. Gordon Willis

The single most consequential craftsperson on the trilogy, and the most conspicuous omission in the Academy's history.

Before¶

Queens-born; his father was a Warner Bros. makeup man. He learned filmmaking in the Air Force during the Korean War, came out, joined the East Coast camera union, and spent thirteen years working up from assistant to operator to first cameraman — an unusually long apprenticeship that shows in the total absence of showing-off in his work.

Feature debut in 1970. By 1971 he had shot Klute for Alan J. Pakula and Loving for Irvin Kershner, and had a reputation for being difficult, which he did nothing to correct.

He almost turned The Godfather down; he thought the production sounded chaotic and Coppola inexperienced. They fought throughout. Neither has ever pretended otherwise, and both have said the friction produced the film.

What he actually did¶

Top light. The single decision that defines the trilogy. Lighting from directly above throws the eye sockets into shadow, so that Vito is frequently unreadable — you cannot see what he is thinking, and neither can anyone in the room. Brando embraced it. Willis extended it to Michael as the films proceed.

Deliberate underexposure. Willis shot the interiors far darker than a 1971 studio thought was releasable. Paramount's lab reported the dailies as unusable and offered to correct them. He and Coppola refused, repeatedly, and the studio was still complaining months in. Every home video transfer before the 2008 restoration brightened the film substantially — which means most people who watched The Godfather between 1980 and 2008 never actually saw it.

Tableau composition. No zooms, no handheld, no helicopters, no coverage-for-safety. Locked, symmetrical, painterly frames — Willis's own word was tableau — so that the handful of camera moves land as events.

Colour as geography. New York interiors are amber-black. Sicily is blown-out gold. Nevada in Part II is cold blue-grey. Havana is hot and sick. You always know where you are without a caption.

Period as a look. The 1901–1925 sequences in Part II are sepia-warm and slightly diffused, in visible contrast to the harder 1958 material — the film's two timelines are colour-graded as two different memories.

See Cinematography for the extended version, and Craft & Video Essays for Willis on the record.

The snub¶

Between 1970 and 1977, Gordon Willis shot six films that between them received 39 Academy Award nominations and 19 wins.

He received zero nominations in that period. Not for The Godfather. Not for Part II. Not for The Parallax View, All the President's Men, or Annie Hall.

The usual explanations: the work was ahead of the Academy's cinematography branch, which then rewarded visible technique rather than restraint; the darkness was read as error by people who had spent careers ensuring you could always see the actors; and Willis's open contempt for Hollywood, and for Los Angeles, did not help. He worked out of New York and did not court anybody.

He was finally nominated for Part III (1991) and for Zelig (1984), and won neither. The Academy gave him an Honorary Award in 2009, five years before he died.

The rest of the work¶

Woody Allen, eight films: Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan — the black-and-white 2.35:1 New York that everyone has been imitating for forty-five years — Stardust Memories, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

Alan J. Pakula, the paranoia trilogy: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), All the President's Men (1976) — where the Washington Post newsroom is lit like a laboratory and the parking garage is lit like nothing at all.

He directed one film, Windows (1980), which was poorly received, and largely retired after The Devil's Own (1997).