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Koch won the CSC Award for best commercial cinematography for a spot about TVO's Saturday Night at the Movies, and was nominated in the theatrical category for Last Night (1998). He also received Genie Award nominations for I've Heard the Mermaids (1987) and Last Night. I spoke to the affable Douglas Koch at his home in Toronto in November. WW When and where were you born? DK Vancouver, 1960. WW What was your education? DK I went to high school, Sentinel Secondary in West Vancouver, and then right after graduation I moved to Toronto and entered the Ryerson film program. WW What sparked your interest in film? DK One of our English teachers in the eleventh or twelfth grade taught an elective called film and literature. The idea was to read a book and watch a film made from the book. For example, Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal. We had to write an essay about how the film differed from the book. Part of the course work was to make a short movie, which in those days was much more of a pain in the butt than it is today. Kodak had a plant in North Vancouver, so there was no excuse for not doing the assignment. At that time I just assumed everything I saw on television or the movies was made in Hollywood, or elsewhere. Apart from the Beachcombers or the local news, you didn't think of stuff being made locally. I started to investigate and quickly came to realize that filmmaking was a very departmentalized business. You're a director, cinematographer, sound recordist, whatever, and so a few different people I talked to told me perhaps I should go to film school and then I would have a clearer idea of what I wanted to do. WW Did any film back then that catch your interest or make a difference? DK I have always been interest in space travel and astronomy. I thought 2001 was a really captivating film. Because it was enigmatic and puzzling, it really fascinated me. It was not like any other film I had seen and really captured my imagination. Also Day of the Jackal had a big influence. I saw it again just a while ago, and it still impresses me. It's a very well constructed film. WW Did you become interested in cinematography at Ryerson? DK Basically, yes. I had made a couple of Super 8 films in high school, where I did everything. So I thought maybe I would be a director, but as I got into it and made some more films, I realized that what I really enjoyed was the cinematography part of it - constructing the image visually. There were way more people better at directing then me. WW Were you at Ryerson the same time as Bruce McDonald and Peter Mettler? DK They were a year ahead of me, but I made some films with them. What was unusual about my class, as it passed through the four-year course, was that it was a very small. By the time we made it to the fourth year, there was only 10 or 12 of us left in the course. Whereas the year before us, and the year after us, there must have been 30 or 40 students per class. By the time I had reached my third year, I knew it was cinematography that I wanted to do, but then I had to convince others to let me shoot their films, and with so few students, that was a problem. I had to go outside my immediate class to shoot films for others. Also, there was a heavy experimental bent at Ryerson, with Bruce Elder and Jim Kelly on the teaching staff, so everyone was doing everything on their own films. Eventually I would collaborate with Bruce and Peter on their short films. WW When did you graduate? DK In 1983. I remember shooting a short around that time, A Trip around Lake Ontario, as an assistant to Peter. I'm dying to see that film again. And a bit later I worked with Peter on the Patricia Rozema short Passion: A Letter in 16mm. Peter knew that I was into lighting, which is of course a huge part of cinematography, whereas he was never that much into lighting and more interested in the design of the shots. We made a number of films together, including Bruce's short Knock! Knock!. Peter shot it, and I did the lighting. WW You were working with members of the burgeoning Toronto New Wave - Patricia, Bruce, Peter, Atom Egoyan and later Don McKellar. It was an incredible rich and vibrant time for the independent Toronto film scene. And during this time you also began to shoot music videos. DK I've always said if you want to learn the craft of cinematography, get into music videos as quick as you can. You will be very frequently forced to produce something from nothing, which is always a great training ground. You will have to go into strange places with a bunch of lights and some crazy smoke machine - although, that's very 1980s - with the minimum budget for the art department, and probably not much of an idea for the end result. It's incredible how much they rely on you, the DOP, to come with ideas to make the video work. And if you can actually make it work, then you will get more work and better pay. I really learnt so much from making these low-budget Canadian music videos. I was constantly being forced to pull a rabbit out of a hat. WW It was a great time for music videos. They were actually playing them on network and cable television in heavy rotation. DK You're right. Someone was telling me the other day that MTV in the States and MuchMusic in Canada don't play music videos anymore. It's all these weird reality shows. I guess they're on YouTube today. I think they have strong nostalgic value now. WW As far as I can determine, the first feature-length drama you shot was The Kidnapping of Baby John Doe, which was made for television (1987). Is that correct? DK That's right. I don't remember clearly how it came about - I somehow met the husband and wife filmmaking team of Patricia and Peter Gerretsen. They had made some educational films, and all I could show them was Patricia's film, Passion. I went over to their house, they had a 16-mm projector, and I showed them the film. They watched the whole thing, and we discussed it afterwards. I must have been 26 at the time, and I was determined to get this TV movie. And sure as hell, they hired me. I couldn't believe it. It was the first thing I had done that was feature length. It was an interesting experience, and it led to I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. WW Which I do want to talk to you about because it many ways it's the film broke the mould of English-Canadian filmmaking. It's one of the key films of the Toronto New Wave, and stylistically it was quite radical. It was shot in colour, black and white and on video, and as far as I'm concerned, it's one of the very finest films ever made about the City of Toronto. Tell me how you became involved with Mermaids?
DK I already knew Patricia and Alex [Raffe, the co-producer of Mermaids] because of my work on Passion. When they approached me about making a feature, they asked me how I would shoot it. They didn't have any real money, so 35 mm was out of the question. They were hoping, somewhere down the line, that the film would play two weeks at the Carlton Cinemas in Toronto, like Atom had done with his first feature, Next of Kin, which I had worked on as an assistant. So they asked me what format they should use. I had shot Baby John Doe on Super 16 because the Gerretsens had some notion that they could blow it up for a low-budget release. There's no such thing as a Super 16 projector, so the only way to show it in a theatre would have been to blow it up to 35. But since Patricia and Alex didn't see their film as a theatrical release - the best they were hoping for was renting 16-mm projectors for a screening at the Carlton - I said let's go with regular 16 mm. Then to my surprise, they did blow it up to 35 mm. WW But you also used video. Polly's confession to the camera, which frames the beginning and end of the movie, is recorded on video. DK What we did is shoot those scenes on video, probably Betacam or something like that, I really don't remember. Then to convert to film, we did it very cheaply by simply filming the image on the television monitor. Instead of blowing all sorts of money we didn't have by doing it the 'proper way,' I knew of a way of shooting the image off the screen that was flicker free. There were a few, little technical things I had to work around, but it could be done. It was done more in a way that we knew it would give the film a crazy look, but in a pragmatic, cheapest way possible. Fortunately, we had some time while shooting that sequence to send the footage to the lab to see if was working the way we wanted it too. I played with the image on the monitor, for example, to make Shelia's hair redder. I must say of all the projects I have shot, Mermaids is the best script I have ever worked on. Not only could I not put it down when I received it, I was completely charmed by it. I couldn't wait to see what this crazy girl was going to do next. I loved the writing, and during production it was a real treat to see what Shelia [McCarthy as Polly] would come up with. It was a joy to work on, and I really looked forward to a day's shoot. And that's only happened to me a few times. WW How did you do the flying sequence in Mermaids? DK That sequence is really just an example of simple cinematic tricks. WW Did you use wires? DK No, there are no wires. It's basically Shelia lying on a diving board. The gaffer on the shoot, David Owen, lived in this crazy collective in downtown Toronto, on Wellington Street, west of Bathurst. From the roof there was this great view of the Toronto skyline in the distance. So we had Shelia on this diving board, and what I suggested we do was use the Toronto skyline as the background. It was so far away, and I used a long lens, and then we dollyed from side to side, giving a sense of movement. It looked like the buildings passing behind her. We used wind machines and small things such as zooming in as we passed her; whatever we could think of without turning the whole thing into a dangerous stunt. WW What I love about the film is that it shows Toronto in a fanciful light, and it has a love for the city akin to Woody Allen's love for Manhattan in his earlier films. DK Toronto is a pretty cool place, with a lot of cool locations, which are disappearing rapidly. I can't believe that so many of the places I used to shoot in are now gone. WW How long did it take to shoot Mermaids? DK We didn't have much money, but we did have the time. I would guess about five weeks. WW Then, of course, the film had a tremendous success at Cannes in 1987, winning the Prix de la Jeunesse, and an unprecedented commercial success upon its theatrical release later in the year. DK I always thought people would like the film. There was no question that the script was really great and the performances were wonderful, particularly Shelia. But then to see the film in a theatre and have people standing and clapping and going absolutely ballistic, it was wild. I had never before - or since - encountered anything like it. Definitely it was a big surprise. I remember the morning after the Cannes screening I was working on another film. No one had called me to tell me what had happened, until someone on the set came up to me with a newspaper and said, 'Check out what happened to the film you worked on at Cannes.' It was crazy, and for the next couple of weeks there were stories in the paper about the film and Patricia every day. Then it played TIFF in the fall, and the whole thing started all over again. WW You received a Genie Award nomination for the film. DK That's correct, and I lost to Guy Dufaux [csc]. Un Zoo la nuit was the other Canadian film shown at Cannes that year. It also cleaned up at the Genies. [Ed's note: Un Zoo won 13 Genies in 1988, a record that still stands, although Shelia did win for best actress and Paule Baillargeon as the curator for supporting actress.] WW Following Mermaids, you shot a film for Don Owen, Turnabout (1988). DK I only shot part of that one. It was a really neat idea, and I had a chance to work with Don, who was quite an eccentric character. My agent at the time introduced me to the project, and she was enthusiastic because the script was completely from a woman's point of view, yet a man had written it. How I became involved was because Don had shot most of the film with another cinematographer, but when he got into the cutting room he wanted to shoot more footage, which I did. WW Also around this time, in the late 1980s, you worked with Deepa Mehta for the first time, on an unusual film called Martha, Ruth & Edie. Unusual, in the sense that it had three women directors - Deepa, Norma Bailey from Winnipeg and Daniele J. Suissa from Quebec. DK I was hired by the producers who said they really loved my work and I was told I could give this thing a unity of vision. Originally the three segments were to be shot by three different cinematographers and I was hired to shoot the beginning and end, to wrap it all together. However, that wasn't going to work, so I shot the whole thing. But I had three bosses to satisfy. It sure made me busy, prepping with three different directors, who all had different ideas. To complicate matters, there was another director assigned to the film, but she had creative difference with the producers and so Deepa was brought in at the last minute. WW You shot one of my favourite Canadian documentaries, The Falls (1991), for Kevin McMahon. Tell me a bit about that one because it really is an intelligent documentary. DK That was certainly one of the smartest documentaries I ever shot. Kevin is a very clever lad, and what made it interesting was that he was brought up in Niagara Falls, and as a journalism student he used to write these scathing articles about what the Hooker chemical company was doing on the other side of the Niagara River, in New York. I meet Kevin through his brother, Michael, who was the producer and editor on the film. We shot it in Super 16, so we could blow it up for a theatrical release. I must have spent six or seven weeks in Niagara Falls shooting the film. I really enjoyed myself on that one. And I can tell you we are in a lot of Japanese home movies. Every time we set up a shot, we were surrounded by tourists. We became one of the attractions. WW At some point you began to shoot commercials and became an in-demand cameraman with an impressive list of clients. DK I think it's a natural progression for people who make music videos to segue into commercials. Music videos are quite a grind in terms of what you have to accomplish in a small amount of time. There are not a lot of music video directors who can move into dramatic features, so commercials become the natural extension for music video directors and cinematographers. WW Jumping ahead to the mid-1990s, you again lensed a film by Patricia Rozema, When Night Is Falling, her lesbian 'coming out' film that has one of the most erotic love scenes in Canadian cinema. DK I must admit it was pretty unusual having a lesbian love scene with two straight actors, a lesbian director and two straight guys shooting it, my assistant and I. What I remember most about the controversy surrounding the film was the fact that Blockbuster Video forced Patricia to censor the lovemaking scene. There was one moment that Blockbuster demanded a cut if it was going to sell or rent the film. No ifs, ands or buts. Patricia, who was livid with this, said 'Okay, if you are going to force me to cut the scene, at least put on the display box that it had been abridged by Blockbuster.' But they simply said, flat out, 'no.' Apparently this was Blockbuster policy, and as a consequence I boycotted them for years. I thought it was very underhanded of them to have the power to censor a film but not acknowledge they had done it.
WW When Night Is Falling is another film with fantasy sequences and a wonderful punk version of the Cirque du Soleil. DK We looked at it as Cirque du Soleil - but not as good. They didn't get the good people, although I will always remember the Steben sisters, a twin acrobatic high wire act. It's one thing to present this sort of weird, punky circus, but it's another thing to actually deliver the goods. We were really blown away filming them. They're incredible. [Ed's note: The Montreal-born Steben sisters, identical twins, have performed with the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vagas.] What many people don't know about that film is that the first script I saw was very different from the final version that appears on the screen. In the version I read, the Camille character [played by Pascale Bussières] is having an affair with the head of the Christian college where she works. It's a totally secret affair, completely off limits, and exposure would cost them both their jobs. Then she runs into circus girl [Rachel Crawford], has an affair with her, but it turns out that circus girl is the daughter of the head of the college. He has completely disowned her, wants nothing to do with her, and so has never mentioned his daughter to Camille. I thought this was great, amazing. What a great plot twist. But Patricia got so much heat from her backers and Telefilm Canada and I don't know who else that she had to make significant changes to soften the impact of the film. WW Yes, but after the commercial failure of her previous film, White Room, Patricia needed a success and I know she's smart enough to realize that. DK I know, I know. Still, it's a good-looking film, and the art department did a bang up job. WW Last Night is another great Toronto film that you shot, this time for Don McKellar. The movie poster has that iconic shot of a disabled Toronto streetcar with Sandra Oh in the foreground. DK We had co-operation from the TTC to shoot the streetcar scene, where the mob tries to flip one. But the TTC said there is no way we could actually do it. The thing is so heavy and the centre of gravity is so low. But they did manage to rock it. Actually, we shot a lot of the exterior scenes for that movie up on Old Weston Road, which is in the northwestern part of the city. I had never been to that part of the city. It has a small-town feel about it. I enjoyed working on that one; it was a good script.
WW Following Last Night, you shot two for Deepa Mehta, Bollywood/Hollywood and The Republic of Love. DK Bollywood/Hollywood was a real hoot. I really like working with Deepa. She's a very decisive type of person. Sometimes she would only do one take, which always gave me the shivers. All the technical elements - camera operating, composition, focus, sound - had to be good right from the start of the scene, as she would frequently used the first take. But it's true that the best, most authentic performances come with the first few takes. If you have to do 10 or 12 takes on a drama, you know there's something wrong. You get the most natural performances early, so you have to be poised to get it right the first time WW Did you watch the authentic Bollywood dance films to get a feel for the style? DK I watched some of them, but they do get repetitive with their shameless Sergio Leone-style zooms. Deepa wanted to create her own style, mixing up Bollywood. We had a great cast of Indian actors, who were such nice people. Some of them were huge stars back home. We didn't shoot a lot in the South Asian parts of town, but whenever we did, they attracted a lot of attention. Deepa has a very strong, unified sense of the colour palette she wants to use. She didn't want to see the colour green. She wanted the reds, the yellows and the blues to stand out. I was okay with that, and worked within her range, to the point of experimenting with some over-the-top techniques, which proved to be a real pain in the ass, even dangerous. These days, with digital intermediaries and the ability to play with colour, it can be done with relative ease. I designed some filters that were not easy to use, but maintained the proper skin tones and clear whites while turning the background foliage into a weird shade of brown. It's a very romantic story, so we wanted the leads to look good all the time.
DK The Bronx Is Burning is essentially a baseball film based on a book. It's the year 1977 in New York City. The city is facing bankruptcy, and there was a killer summer heat wave, a huge blackout that led to widespread looting and arson, there was the Son of Sam killings, and President Jimmy Carter basically said 'New York City can go screw itself.' Then the New York Yankees won the World Series with Reggie Jackson hitting three home runs with three swings of the bat. The focus was the tension between Jackson, the Yankee manager, Billy Martin, and owner, George Steinbrenner, set against this backdrop of what is going in the city. It was an eight-hour miniseries, and pretty grueling to shoot. We shot most of it in New London, Connecticut, and a little bit in New Haven; it just wasn't practical to shoot in New York, although the second unit shot locations and street scenes in the city. Most of the television dramas I have done are with Jeremiah Chechik. He directed National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Benny & Joon, which is an intensely good film. Then he did a remake of Diabolique with Sharon Stone, which got trashed, and then The Avengers, which got dumped by the studio. In a way I feel sorry for the guy because The Avengers is not the film he set out to make. I worked with him on a drama called Meltdown in Vancouver and then the Bronx project came up. We also shot a pilot for a really funny show called the Middleman, which was picked up. But they wanted to shoot it in L.A., and I wasn't interested. The great thing about a pilot is you have more time and money, and you get to set the tone for the series if it gets picked up. Although once you get into a series, it will have lots of standing sets, which buys you a certain freedom because the repetition means it gives you the ability to experiment or fall back on what you have done before, so there is something to be said for shooting a series. I just wasn't interested in spending six months in Los Angeles at the time. WW Looking back, what is your most satisfying moment in your career as a cameraman? Or your most satisfying film? DK I've Heard the Mermaids Singing because it was such a pleasure to work on and in the end having it turn out so well. My memory of it is that is was a tough shoot and I was not all that experienced, but there's that bit of 'no pain no gain' cliché. Just because you had a good time making something, doesn't mean you will have a good film at the end. But Mermaids might just be the exception to the rule. Despite the difficulties of the shoot, I really enjoyed doing it and the result turned out really well. WW What's the best piece of professional advice you ever received? DK My mentor, Alar Kivilo [DOP on A Simple Plan and The Blind Side], back at the time when I was starting out in the business, told me, 'The bitterness of low quality lingers long after the sweetness of low cost is gone.' That's my favourite quote. WW Thank you for your time. [ Magazine ][ Archives ][ Search ]
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