Aboard the bus
Cinematographer helps ‘Paterson’ director put poetry in motion
For 40 years, Frederick Elmes has taken jobs that might strike other cinematographers as needlessly complicated.
Case in point is filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s new “Paterson,” which opens Friday and is about a poet. Though poetry may possess some cinematic qualities, writing poetry doesn’t often find its way to the local multiplex.
“You know, Jim actually didn’t lead with that, the poetry,” Elmes said. “He just said, ‘I’m making a picture about a bus driver in Paterson.’ Which is right up Jim’s alley. He likes stories about the everyday person, the working man whose life isn’t dramatic.”
Elmes has worked with Jarmusch since 1991, so he was on board, knowing the process would be as rewarding as it was challenging.
So they filmed the story of a poet named Paterson, played by Adam Driver, who drives a bus in the city of Paterson, N.J.
An independent cinematic auteur, Jarmusch’s work often involves repetitions and subtle variations on themes, giving it a quality similar to minimalist music. “Paterson” may be the best representation of that style thus far in his filmography. Paterson, the poet, is a creature of habit.
“He’s a person whose life is driven by routine,” Elmes said. “He drives the same bus every day, the same schedule, the same walk home. It allows him to free his mind to think about the things he can write poetry about.”
So Elmes helped Jarmusch find the barely perceptible dif- ferences in that routine. Paterson spends his lunch eating by the same waterfall.
“It’s a different waterfall every day,” Elmes said. “There are these factors that make it look different. The amount of sunlight, the clouds. The falls look very different on a cloudy day than they do on a sunny day. That was the wonderful part of photographing the film for me. Every day, there is something slightly different there that would inspire him that wasn’t there yesterday. Finding those little triggers that allowed him to write was a challenge but a rewarding one.”
Elmes, 70, was born in New Jersey and initially wanted to be a still photographer. But he frequently found himself trying to assemble narratives out of his photographs. Film became a natural next step.
At the American Film Institute, he met an aspiring filmmaker, who enlisted him to shoot an experimental film called “Eraserhead.” Though savaged on its initial release, David Lynch’s film became a cult classic.
Elmes was in Houston in November at the Cinema Arts Festival for a 40th-anniversary screening of the film. He worked on subsequent Lynch films including “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart.” Following “Wild at Heart,” he joined Jarmusch for “Night on Earth,” released in 1991.
Their partnership has endured since, despite plenty of logistical difficulties presented by Jarmusch’s peculiar visions for his films.
“Jim said, ‘This is gonna be great because I got two actors in a very small space: a car! And they can’t move, so I have control,’ ” Elmes recalled. “Of course, he’d never shot inside cars before, so it proved to be challenging.”
Elmes took the “Paterson” job and immediately spent a day on a bus viewing the city, which has a rich history as a hub for America’s industrial revolution.
The shoot provided greater complications for the two to overcome than “Night on Earth” did.
“A bus is just about the ultimate in difficulty,” Elmes said. “First, you have to find a route around the city that shows the things outside the windows that you want to see. But traveling north you get one view, but traveling south tends to put things in shadows. Another thing we learned is city buses have notoriously horrible suspension systems.”
Jarmusch and Elmes decided to have two camera crews shooting at once to minimize the number of times the bus had to follow a particular route.
But buses are rich with reflective surfaces.
“We learned quickly it’s easy to shoot the reflection of a camera crew huddled behind an actor,” he said. “So that was another thing we had to overcome. The shoot became a series of solving little problems. That made it more manageable.”
Elmes views those challenges as part of the sum of what makes each film an interesting project.
“Each film, the chemistry is different,” he said. “Some directors are more interested in the story and not at all in the actors. Some are obsessed by the cinematography and the quality of the lights. You end up with a group of artisans and actors that will never be replicated. That’s interesting to me.”
Ideally, he’ll avoid bus shoots for a while. And maybe shooting on water, too.
“I’ve been fortunate to never have shot at sea,” he said. “A lake is bad enough. But the sea you have so little control. You really realize how small you are in the universe.”