he was signed to Propaganda Films: a young, hip, burgeoning production
company. Bay and another young director named David Fincher were
making names for themselves directing cutting edge music videos, and
both used Schwartzman to shoot them. Soon advertising agencies were
clamoring for the hip filmmakers to direct and shoot their commercials.
For a couple of years in the
late 1980s, Schwartzman was
working 200 days a year. Every
week, he would scout locations
on Monday, prep, and shoot
Thursday through Saturday,
and start all over again on
Monday. At just 28 years old,
Schwartzman was earning a
couple hundred thousand
dollars a year and was one of
the hottest commercial cine-
matographers in the business.
Contacted by a company
who wanted to reinvent the
image of director Jeremiah
Chechik, Schwartzman was
hired to shoot commercials
for him. When Chechik was
later hired to direct the feature
Benny and Joon, he turned to Schwartzman to film it. "The last movie
I had shot was Red Surf, a low budget genre movie . . . Benny and Joon
had a real story; I loved the script." In 1991, he went to Seattle to shoot
the project. The union came in during filming and organized the
crew. Schwartzman and the film loader, being the only two nonunion
crew members, paid their $5,000 admission fee and were added to the
union roster.
When Schwartzman returned to Los Angeles, he married and made
the commitment to work on movies only on alternate years, spending the
intervening years making commercials, so that he could build and main-
tain a personal life. "I just didn't want to be the guy who went from
location to location, living out of hotel rooms . . . The nice thing about
commercials is you can pick and choose your schedule . . . On a movie,
you can't even go to the dentist or the doctor. As a cinematographer you
cannot be sick. Unless you have a 105 fever, you're there, wrapped up in
a blanket, sitting in a chair, shivering. You don't get a day off, because
they can't make the movie without you."
"Part of my job as
a cinematographer is to
keep the attitude on the
set positive. When you
find out that lunch is a
half hour late because the cook screwed up
and everybody is hungry--we've been
working in the rain and we're cold and all
we want is to take a break--that's when you
start to hear grumbling. What you try to
do is keep everybody focused . . . That's part
of my job--sometimes it's a lot of my job."
--John Schwartzman
"Listen to your subconscious,
because your subconscious knows a lot."
--John Schwartzman
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