Inside the Production of ‘Salinger’: DP Buddy Squires Discusses the Doc -
on September 19, 2013 11:07 am
J.D. Salinger
Shooting the many interviews contained within Salinger, director Shane Salerno’s ambitious documentary about the famously reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye, was a years-long process. The first person to join Salerno on his project was Buddy Squires, whose list of credits would be the envy of just about any cinematographer working in the documentary arena. Squires has shot interviews with every type of subject, from veteran entertainers and politicians to those who are completely unaccustomed to being photographed. People interviewed for Salinger ran the gamut, from celebrities such as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Martin Sheen to Ethel Nelson, the Salinger family neighbor in Cornish, N.H., who’d never spoken publicly about the long period she’d spent watching over the author’s children.
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Squires shot, as he frequently does, with a Panasonic AJ-HDC27H VariCam, recording to DVCPRO 100 tape. Although he has since begun recording the more robust signal from the camera’s HD-SDI out to a Sound Devices PIX 240, he says he’s been very happy with the results when he’s shot to tape, even for theatrical distribution. “It up-reses nicely,” he says, noting that he shot both Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five and Rory Kennedy’s Emmy-nominated documentary Ethel (about Ethel Kennedy), among many other films, at 720p. “The coloremitry is a lot better than some cameras with much higher resolutions. There’s more to a good-looking image than resolution.”
Salerno designed Salinger for theatrical distribution, and that decision informed the way the cinematographer composed his frames. “An extreme close-up that might work well on a television might be far too close to work well on a 40-foot screen,” he notes. “Also, Salerno wanted to frame the interview subjects whenever possible within a geographic context. New York, Los Angeles and rural New Hampshire all play a role in Salinger and the director wanted to frame his subjects accordingly. Squires’ primary lens was a Canon 11×4.7 zoom, often used at about 30mm and fairly wide open on the stop. The resulting images feature softly recognizable backgrounds reinforcing a sense of place.
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| Martin Sheen gets interviewed for Salinger. |
Squires’ lighting varied a great deal depending on the situation. Ethel Nelson, who had experienced the Salinger family’s day-to-day existence as intimately as almost anybody, had never made any attempt to tell her story previously, so when the small crew (Salerno, Squires and sound mixer Mark Roy) showed up at her door and she let them in, it was important to get her comfortable quickly.
“She sat down in her favorite chair, I moved one of her lamps a little closer to her, and we just started shooting,” Squires says. Subsequently, they did two additional interviews with her in New York in front of a large wall of windows with a view looking out at the Empire State Building. “But I don’t think she’d have opened up to us the first time if we’d showed up at her house and said, ‘We’re going to bring in a whole bunch of lights and we’ll be ready in 25 minutes,’” the cinematographer stresses.
For some other subjects—book editors, ex-girlfriend Joyce Maynard and others—Squires did quite a bit of lighting. “We did more extensive lighting on this than on many other documentaries,” he says. “My typical lighting package is a couple of ARRI kits that fit in the back of a car, but for a lot of the Salinger interviews we had a van well stocked with two or three good-sized HMIs.
“There were times when we would film someone in New York at night and I would go to the roof of the building I was working in and shine HMIs across to a water tower or some other pieces of architecture that were visible out the window,” he elaborates. “Same thing in Los Angeles, where I would light up trees or distant buildings. Shane and I really wanted a strong sense of depth and space and place to come through in the interviews wherever possible.”
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